Age of Gold,” answered the Golden Khaghan. Very happy he was to hear this speech, as he sought to win them over from the old Iron. The last of the Iron Khans had wandered their steppe, reduced to barter his garments piece by piece for sheep to eat. Before the dinner he had been captured (to live out his life in company with the prisoner-emperors of Song) but the major, almost the only figure of Qatat’s fight-back, Ile Dashi, was still at liberty. Last known address on Orqon Gol, where Qatat had kept a remote outer station to watch the steppe – within Marquz Khan’s area. However, Marquz Khan had scarcely heard of him (Ile who?) nor had the least guess where he might be now.
What he knew went into Khabul’s ear. Ile Dashi was an honest soldier who had tried hard to be loyal to the last Iron Khan, but the man’s ill-leadership defeated him. To start he had abandoned his court and his army and fled over the Khingans. In his absence court and army thought they had a right, as they had the need, to elect another king; they chose his uncle, whom he had left in charge of the defence. A hard year later, when his aunt, now the widow-queen, with Ile Dashi, led their Emaciated Army to join the fugitive, he punished her disloyalty with death. Then, too late, he imagined that his kingdom wasn’t lost, and concocted grandiose schemes and insisted on rash skirmishes. In the end Ile Dashi left him to the fate of his vainglory, and re-grouped, with tribal support, on the Orqon, Qatat’s last bastion. He hadn’t given up, but when Jurchen dispossessed Song of their capital he acknowledged the realities and took his remnants west.
“You liked him?” Khabul asked his neighbour khan.
“Yes, he was a memory of Qatay as Qatay once was... and I had certain loyalties myself.”
On these questions – whose side they had espoused in the revolt, or the whereabouts of Ile Dashi – the Golden Khaghan didn’t impolitely push them, if only they transferred their loyalties to him. They had gone so far as to dance for him. The Idiqut of Uighur (famous for dance) twirled ribbons with a tranquil grace; Khabul kicked up his heels and slapped them. To dance is no indignity: the idea is an exhibit of your culture, like the articles you bring, your people’s yield and wares. A khaghan, a khan-of-khans, is danced to, but an emperor’s equivalent is abasement.
Which species had asked them to dinner? Which sat on the throne of the north half of China: a khaghan or an emperor? Khabul, who had a comic’s license, volunteered to find out on behalf of the dinner guests from the north. He began with Arzat’s companions, most of whom had been Akuta’s. “Five years in China,” he said to them, “and you haven’t untied your pig’s tails. I have to call you steadfast.”
This was rowdy jest; slightly bruised, they told him the pig’s tail had come down from their mother sow.
“It’s always the hair. With the Turks China had a phrase: to untie the tresses. That’s when a barbarian converts to civilization and an honest Turk becomes a bastard Chinese. Isn’t that what they used to say in your heyday, Idiqut?”
The Idiqut, whose heyday was three centuries ago, half-closed his eyes and curled up his lips, like the idol of his kingly title.
“Now, I’ve never seen a Jurchen with a beard. Though I understand the Chinese take a yard of grey beard as a guarantee of sagacity. But Arzat, you must have started on yours in the days you sat on tigers’ skins for glory. Or have you entwined a horse’s tail into it?” There he leant across (the dinner was intimate, and he had a yard of arm) and gave the beard an experimental tug.
Hoelun laughed.
“See, you can’t help but laugh. His Jurchen companions laughed, that was the thing. His Chinese courtiers were shocked to their silken shoes, but the Golden Khaghan had to laugh along. To a Jurchen there is nothing remotely rude in a joke with a chief, even if he is jumped-up into an emperor.”
“But he changed his mind.”
“The courtiers changed his mind for him, behind the scenes (where courtiers work). They convinced him Khabul was a whipper-up of trouble, a rebel and a malcontent, and that he had profaned the emperor’s person. When he left Zhongdu, heaped up with gifts of silk, a squad went on his heels to do him a mischief. The squad were too clumsy for my grandfather, who ambushed their ambush; next year war was underway.
“And what of the Golden Khaghan’s other guests from that banquet? A price was put on Marquz Khan’s head for loyalist sympathies and harbour of Ile Dashi; turned in by Tartars, he became the first to ride the wooden donkey. Subsequently the Idiqut aligned Uighur not to the east but to the west, in a league with Ile Dashi’s new state of Black Qatat. His Tartar friends still visit. But the dinners aren’t intimate, and they do not dance. They lie flat in abasement on his floor.” Yesugei left a moment’s silence. “That is why we hate them and despise them, the Jurchen and the Tartars, who both, as my grandfather said, are bastards, and that is why I go eagerly to war. And you, wife?”
“I drive your wagon eagerly to war, but there are times I wish I were your captain of clan group in arms and not your wife.”
“I don’t have those times,” he said.
“You know who I am named after? A Qatat queen’s sister who campaigned on the steppe – the one who put that outer station on the Orqon. Do women often fight in Kiyat?”
“Never been heard of,” he said.
“Your Aunt Tamsag gutted an Oirat the way she guts a trout. I have heard her recount the tale.”
“Fantasy,” he said. “The old dear.”
Hoelun’s needlework had to do with fish, strange on Yesugei’s walls. The needle wasn’t her best instrument, either, and she’d have stowed her samplers in the bottom of her chests, but he displayed them.
Acquaintance with her new tribe had she none, taught for a life in Merqot, not in Kiyat. She had to ask questions. Yesugei’s cast-off slave love was a sensitive matter to ask questions on.
“She isn’t in your tents, Yesugei?”
“No. She is in the tents of Arash, now.”
This seemed to be clear, to him. “It is equivalent to divorce?” A casual equivalent, for slaves.
Yesugei stopped a moment, and then stated the obvious (to him). “As she is in his tents, I have, of course, no rights in her. I won’t violate the rights of my own nokor – he’d have to come to me and complain, and I’d have to throw me under the axe. In that, like a divorce has happened, yes.”
Whether he had rights hadn’t been her question. But he answered humorously against embarrassment or discomfort, although answered fully because he understood her difficulty, her ignorance of Kiyat. Ongirat, who aren’t militant, own no slaves.
Yesugei’s staff were slaves. Not Jangsiut, the tribe in enslavement that fought alongside Kiyat, to be distinguished by their grown-out hair. His staff were individual captives, their great-great grandfathers captured by his great-great grandfather. In behaviour towards and from these she saw no difference to the free; Yegei Qongdaqor wore a hat, a velvet hat, which can’t be quite correct. Correct is for neat theory, not for day-to-day.
Mongols are known, to their neighbours, as on the extreme side of strict, in sex. Not that Turks aren’t true to wedlock, for example, but Mongols peculiarly. Adulterers – rare and monstrous creatures who go under the axe. But what is adultery, and isn’t? Slaves aren’t exempt: when you capture a woman in war you are not free of her if she has husband alive. That is adultery. Captive wives can never be so used, unless and until the wife is known a widow.
What about Yesugei? What about her?
Yesugei had done Tchiledu great, great insult. Continued to do, to treat him as if he didn’t exist. (Had he put Tchiledu out of existence life might have been simpler. He hadn’t.) It was one of those sanctioned transgressions, one of those inconsistencies. Similarly, a horse-thief is more foul than a murderer, a horse raid a glory and a theme for song. Seizure of women is a grey area. So, Hoelun found out, are slave loves; and if, when she saw Goagchin with her pet white goats trotting at her heels, a curiosity pricked her and a sympathy, weren’t they akin? At times, still, she felt unchaste. Goats? She knew nothing about Goagchin, beyond
the goats; perhaps she saw too much in them, but a goat is the least of the five domestic animals, almost scorned, and with an ill, nearly a wicked temperament. For Goagchin to trail about camp with her silky, pampered goats, dressed in a style that wasn’t decent to Hoelun’s Ongirat eyes, but that caught eyes... she felt sorry for her.
That went for Bagtor too. Goagchin and her goats she always thought to approach, never did; but when she came across the five-year-old boy, slouching and scowling on his own, in earshot of the gang of camp children, she wasn’t timid. One day she walked into a stone battle between Bagtor, behind the wheel of a wagon, and three little demons about his age, whom she told off thoroughly. This she saw as a serious incident, and though she didn’t quite like to acquaint Yesugei, she had in the children’s captain to talk to: the head shepherd’s son, a lad of eleven with a round, open face and the scars of captaincy upon him, grazes and dung smears and hair they may have to shave off, whether he were noble or not. A far cry from Bagtor, stiffly squeezed into a cute silk suit. If I have children, thought Hoelun, I’ll have grubby scamps, with grins on. Where was Yesugei’s hand in this? A father doesn’t interfere, a lot; he defers to the mother, and doesn’t have unseemly disagreements on how to rear a child.
The gang