to her and her to you and forget where I am due that night and wish I wasn’t. I cannot live like that, I cannot do that with the least conviction, Hoelun.”
“Indeed,” she said in quiet assent.
Less upset, he pursued, “And what does she do, when I detest to be with her? I know Suchigu and I tell you, she’d have Arash anyway. Only he’d try like blazes not to be had. But he’s been had, and in short, how is he meant to leave off? If he doesn’t, I’m supposed to send him under the axe, for trespass against me. It’s impossible, Hoelun. Do you see?”
“I see.”
“We’re human. I am and he is. I’m not going to send him under the axe for that. No, you can have her in the tent, but she goes home to Arash. I am sorry to put my foot down. That is the most I can do.”
“It is your life too, Yesugei. I have no further solicitations of you.”
He nodded, and inquired with a true note of doubt, “You weren’t getting me off your hands?”
“No. I was not.”
He inserted a finger beneath his hat to rub the back of his head. “I haven’t asked whether you are happy with me, Hoelun.”
“It is likely I answer only too often. If I do not say aloud, I hesitate to boast of fortune, out loud. And thought of him inhibits me.”
“Forgive me.”
“Yes. And if we come to grief,” she went on, “next year, next week, know I’d have had things no other way.”
Possibly, possibly, Yesugei felt a guilt too, or if not guilt exactly, fear – fear of getting their own way, overmuch, and tempting fate. To put up with Goagchin about the tent might be a sop to fate or to his conscience, for he did.
The hundred tribes don’t add up to a huge number but that simply doesn’t matter.
“Absolutely doesn’t matter?”
“It never does. – Not unless you contrive to get caught by an army you didn’t know was there. Mind you, even then. Once fifteen horse were caught out by a thousand infantry. They tried to surrender on terms, but the terms bit got a laugh. So they went for the famous end. Into a hawk’s wings, and charge. To their amazement, and that of the infantry, they charged right through them and left a slaughter. No casualties.”
“Just like that.”
“It’s true. They themselves were the last to believe. I thumb my nose at numbers. There are fifty million people in north China and sixty million in the south. Latest intelligence. On the steppe, between Old Qatay and Black Qatat – we haven’t had a census for a century or two – but our guesstimate is a million.”
“Most of them Tartars.”
“You exaggerate, but yes, more Tartars in that than Mongols. Five times more.”
“Fortunately numbers don’t matter.”
They talked like this underneath the nightskins.
Feasts weren’t feasts, either, but war discussion. “It squares to attack them together. Militarily, they’ve got into a tangle. The Iron Khans felt vital to be self-sufficient, which took a lot as they had to fight off the Song. Their horse soldiery is said to have gone giant strides ahead, but with these enormous herds, they spilt about the foot of the Khingans onto Tartar grass. Had to. The magnificent Tartar grass. Tartars got their backs up about that, but the Iron Khans found an answer to them: starve them on their silver. Tartary in the funny situation, rich in silver lodes, empty of iron. Slap on a metal ban for punishment, that’s what the Iron Khans did, and what Jurchen learnt from them to do. And Jurchen have their herds, but Jurchen weren’t a horse people to begin with, and they have half of China. Half of China’s army, to mount. See, they can’t lose Tartary grass. Jurchen and Tartars, they equip each other for war. Disentangle them now, you might get a battle, foot soldiers on one side, silver blades on the other. I’d like to see that.”
Quietly Yesugei said, “Along came Ambaghai.”
Too quietly to be heard; they talked on. “Scabs. If Tartars didn’t trade them horses, I’d shoot Chinese foot soldiers like lame rabbits.”
“Can’t China rear a horse?”
“Yeah, they try. Jurchen have government horse farms. They put a lot of effort in. But they turn out a poor horse.”
“Our horses die like flies in China. It’s bad habitat for them.”
“I wish Jurchen died like flies in China. Why don’t they? It’s wrong habitat for them too.”
“The steppe horse doesn’t take. How’s he to take, on a farm in China? He withers away. He turns up his toes, just as I’d turn up my toes. And then, to have a foot-slogger on top of him? It’s the indignity.”
“A China nag, that’s what becomes of the steppe horse as farm animal. They had more joy with breeds from Outer Persia, only you have to get there... you have to go through Tibet, and after that your problems start. When they had the Turks as conscripts they got there, but the Arabs threw them out. Here there’s a line: step across, you’re in China, and at risk of speedy death merely from the climate. It’s not like that over west. There’s a gradual slope. Cross-breeds have a chance over west, and the Outer Persia horse, he’s a cross-breed, not an artificial one but natively a this-and-that. Goes for the people too, in Outer Persia. It ain’t half so us-and-them. Why a Turk takes, over west.”
“Back to Tartary, and the war.”
“It’s pertinent,” said the excursionist, one of Yesugei’s Three Steeds. Their song told of their travels.
“I’ll tell you what’s pertinent.” Gombo was captain of a clan unit, who in action led fifty of his kin. “Tartars sell horses to the foot soldiers of China, which for cruelty is a crime, and Tartars sold them Ambaghai. Not for iron, since Jurchen are smart enough to keep them lean on iron. Not for iron, which I might have understood though never forgiven. For titles. Titles not in Jurchen, that at least sensibly translates, but titles in Chinese, that to the Chinese they ludicrously mispronounce. For courtesans. Queens of the court, the Chinese say they are, but they aren’t. They aren’t princesses. You know what they are. For silk. For Tartar princes to parade in silks, under sophisticated titles and with sophisticated women on their arms. For Tartars to mimic Chinese. That is what they got in return for Ambaghai. Bastards? They are prostitutes. – Pardon my Chinese, lady. We don’t have a Mongol word for what they are.”
Kiyat were to fight Tartars, that winter.
In the south half of the war the slogan was Khabul’s forty-seven forts. Twenty forts he had taken by arms together with an insurrectionist prince of the Ile – the old clan of the Iron Khans – whose father, instated as a tame king for Jurchen in his home territory, had been executed on suspicion of disloyalty. Which at least assured them of the son’s. A further twenty-seven forts had been clauses in the treaty extracted by his defeat of Hu-sha-hu: disarmament wherever Jurchen had built into Mongol grounds. Arzat had been the builder, a great one for walls. The tracts he built on were Ongirat usage-right, and when Khabul caused these irruptions to be evacuated, Ongirat used them too – the watchtowers for far sight, the barracks to winter their sheep in, the ramparts to drive antelope against. Because they were there. Disarmament, not demolishment; and now these lines had been occupied again. Easily – that was the point of them: where there’s a wall, there an army can penetrate unexposed and China’s killer puzzle of logistics is solved. They were expensive and laborious, but along them China forged outwards, hard to stop. One day there’d be walls on Onon Gol.
But not if Bartan Ba’atur had his say. Bartan intended to take his fight to the Wall and had joined up with Jorkimes for the south campaign. When he said Wall with a capital he meant not Arzat’s new lines, or others obsolete or operational, he meant what they amounted to, and what they stood for. China needs horses, and grass to feed them. China needs territory in the north. Since China first threw the Huns out of the Ordos, and threw up a wall, these ghastly dead gigantic insects that crept across the steppe had been a bone of contention. These ugly mean-spirited possessions of our mother earth, these worms, these anti-liberty flags and wind-blown banners to imprisonment, these thistles in the g
rass, these lines of poison. A nomad can do poetry, on walls. The Wall is what we hate. Civilization is what has done us wrong. Yesugei’s father was out for hachi. Short of hachi, he wasn’t going to be soothed, or quieted, or told to sit at home and grow old... and justice is a distant quest.
Mengetu tried to keep spirits light. “A howling old ba’atur like our father? The Jurchen want to pile stones on their wall and crenelate Zhongdu. He has seen fiercer times than you or I. Even though he is sixty, I’d think twice to challenge him – I don’t know about a baghatur like you.”
“You would be right, were Bartan’s heart not set on rescue of Ambaghai’s remains. His remains are for the ridicule of the crowd, and there is a crowd to get through. Less isn’t to satisfy our father. He won’t be home with less.”
Mengetu jerked to his feet, twanged the string of his bow at his thigh, cast a stern eye on Yesugei. “Then leave him to follow his chief the way he finds pious. This world was but half of loyalty once, half of loyalty and love.”
With a bent head Yesugei stood up beside him. “Now you are right, agha.”
He saw his father off and went to Tartary.
Attai led the south campaign, Cutula the north. Main targets north were China’s pupil-kings Jali the Bull and Yorgi Wolfhound. It was to Jali Ambaghai engaged his daughter, and Yorgi who assaulted Jali’s wedding-guests; Jali