hadn’t lifted a hand on the matter, then or since. They were rivals, but in tandem they earnt their China income. Cutula rode into the operations camp on a yak. Whenever possible he did, both great animals much more at their ease. Yak-cow cross, strictly, that’s yet a heap bigger than an ox; whole yaks get altitude sickness down from the mountains. You can’t charge on a yak into battle, or not that Yesugei ever heard. Might be worth a try. Tartars tossed to left and right on horns. “Nephew,” he bellowed.
“My uncle the khan. And your battle-yak?”
“Iffy. I took him to trials, but when he gets excited he has the drawbacks of an elephant. You know the drawbacks of an elephant.”
“By report.”
“Besides, though he goes forward and back he isn’t greatly subtle beyond that.”
“He’s stupid?”
“Cattle are stupid. Sorry, Zig.” Cutula patted him, and clambered off him.
“Too stupid for battle. Is that a sort of oxymoron?”
His uncle the khan fixed an eye on him. “An oxymoron’s the other thing.”
“Right.”
“I trust you don’t talk like that in front of the troops.”
“No, my jokes are much better.”
“Because I had you in mind to announce us to Jali. What do you say? Nothing major. Just tell him we’re here.”
“Bit of a joke?”
“It’s a tough war, Yesugei. Give us a lucky start.”
For this assignment he took a pick of Kiyat, his nokod and the Wolves, a unit of Tayichiut – not a clan but a created clan, like Jorkimes. A lot of tribes began that way, like Tayichiut. The creators were two brothers of Bilga the General, Ambaghai’s father, both of them alive and there at headquarters, with loops of hair like white rope. Their names weren’t the names their mother gave them but wolf-aliases: Gendu meant a meat-eater he-animal and Olugjin meant an agent of death. These days Uder Unan and Baqaji led the Wolves in action. Their art was close group combat in emulation of their namesakes – the bloody stuff, and high risk – wolves take heavy injuries. Close combat is a speciality, that most who live by archery frankly eschew, as against the whole point. Most archers don’t like to get blood on them, in fact can almost be said to be squeamish (there is religious excuse). Not so Uder Unan and Baqaji: they rubbed animal blood on their faces and hands and told Yesugei now they wouldn’t notice their own.
“I don’t aim to shed your blood. Tonight is a lark. I want to come back intact. No losses. A clean score-stick. Can you do that for me?”
In their blood camouflage they pulled faces at each other. “Stay alive? Suits us.”
At his stirrup, a hand on his knee, Hoelun mentioned again, “Explicit instructions, Yesugei: don’t get hurt.” He had no wish to disappoint her, truly. It charmed him to be seen off to the fight by his wife.
Headquarters were where the Kherlen Gol spilt weedily into Hulun Nor. Two great lakes lay like puddles at the bottom of the steppe, between slow inclines up to the remote mountains east and west; streams ran in but none ran out; rain was unknown here. Hulun Nor, the north lake, had a circumference of two hundred and fifty miles. Beyond the lakes lived Tartars, and swam for pearls. Above the north lake lived Jalaya, and took fish, shrimp and crabs, pelicans, cranes and heron. But the Mongols had a sense they weren’t at the altitude they were used to, and they bothered neither bird nor fish – white flesh and wet flesh, and poor sport into the bargain. They weren’t a water people, but even this early in the year, across the lake to the horizon was a white scintillation at dawn.
Jali the Bull kept winter court in a circular ruin whose history had been forgotten, known simply as the Old Stronghold. There may or may not have been a great castle or what have you, but only a ring of stone remained and stood against the wind. From a nearby bushy hill Yesugei’s team listened to a late night at Jali’s court, the poignant high notes of the stallion’s lute that can be mistaken for human cries. A creek meandered from the hill to the ruins, dry in the winter drought and grown over, where cows spent the night for a cease-fire from the perpetual blast of the north wind. Along this trough went Uder Unan and Baqaji beneath a cow’s hide and with the gait of a cow.
They attacked at first light. The Wolves, with spear and axe, took the gates, as Yesugei depended on them to, for his nokod galloped up the ramp of earth blown against the north face and jumped down on the inside. Kiyat ran rings about the stone circle, shot at any head that popped up and catcalled. “Come out from your walls, Jali. Do Tartars sit in cities?”
Inside, his nokod seized each a mount in gear from in front of a tent, which is more contumelious than to steal mares and spares off the steppe. As soon as he had an answered name-call without the gates, Yesugei blew his horn in imitation of a whirl-away of the wind, and whirl away they did.
There was no pursuit. They had announced themselves: Tartars had seen them, their rosy bulbs of cheeks, their five tresses of hair and a front tuft, that identified a Mongol; and they saw their tuqs, the wolves’ tails and the white stallions’ tails afloat under abstract horns against the sky, signatures, if Tartars knew their Mongols.
Cutula met them effusively, inspected each trophy horse, listened to each tale. The horses’ seats were silver thrones, silvery friezes on the arches before and behind, tapestry skirts (keep them, said the khan to his nokod, at which extravagance Yesugei murmured). Uder Unan and Baqaji described the guards in bronze scale like mirrory snakeskin. Yesugei told of the great tent, for fifty or sixty people, in matt black felt with stripes of glossy panther pelt, and a gold crown to close the smokehole.
Yet in spite of celebrations, in spite of the stallion’s lute and and toasts, the atmosphere was sombre. Bultachu Ba’atur, the captain of a great and gallant nokod, who had been a hero of Yesugei’s since he was a boy, abashed him when he said, “An old-fashioned piece of warfare, Yesugei, with panache, and none down. Just the thing for a song.”
“Start on a lark, I thought.”
“Nevertheless, we’re out to spill blood, aren’t we? Vengeance is had in blood, not in silver seats and warhorses. It’s going to cost us of our own.”
The lutanist dragged his bow with heavy tread from string to string. It may have been a lugubrious song, or they may have imagined sad music. “You with the lute,” bawled Cutula. “Don’t you know a lively tune? What, wring our hearts, because Yesugei has seized Jali’s horses? Upbeat, man. Upbeat.”
There is a curse of contraries. War in earnest set in, and bad luck.
Cutula’s son Girmau was slain at the age of sixteen. In a running skirmish his horse blundered, perhaps in a hole; Girmau, a gymnast, did a kind of cartwheel off and gained his feet unhurt; but on the instant that his friends saw him start to sprint, a Tartar shot him. A fortnight later they thought they had lost Cutula. A group of Mongols and a group of Tartars were in chase, unknown to each other, of the single gazelle in the reeds of the marshes. Cutula didn’t re-join his hunt group. He had had to hide underwater in swamp that never quite congealed; the Tartars found his horse and his overcoat, and after several hours in search of the prize, left him for dead without them. Submerged in the reeds and the water he heard them decide he didn’t stand a chance. Without his horse and overcoat he trekked across the frozen lake, into the north wind, for five days. In disbelief did they see his humpbacked figure, with a raw grimace for a face, trudge up to his ger and into the arms of the half-mad Galut. His size, impossibly, had saved him.
Tartar witches, Bamsi Shaman told Galut, that month had spent their utmost spells upon her hearth. He promised a strong effort, and in the spirit urged on their great embattled eagles, set to guard the camp, and strove with talon and beak against a nightmare of shadow beasts.
Bad spells shaken off, thawed out, only at the edges gnawed away (he lost sight in an eye, and they had to trim him of a few fingers and toes and the fleshy portions of the ears) Cutula was determined on a critical encounter. But a critical encounter Jali did not want. Temptation, bait, sheer insult were wasted
on him. “Where’s his honour? Yesugei’s companions ride his companions’ horses. Where’s his pride?”
“Ah, you’ve got the wrong man. It’s Jali. His idea of gallantry is hire Yorgi Wolfhound to kidnap his own engaged.”
“He’s afraid of the man you can’t freeze. Eh? Can’t freeze his testicles off.”
“No, they didn’t have to cut him there.”
They abandoned headquarters on the nor and marched against the Old Stronghold. Wives drove in quivers and cuirasses, children inside hutches. That deep into winter the steppe where grew the famous Tartar grass was an ash-grey crust, dark grit dunes. Only the sky stayed blue, although lit by a persistent silent lightning in the distance... more a summer phenomenon. Wild lightning in summer. What was on Tangr’s mind, that he crack his skies at the wrong time of year? The wrong time. The wrong time. Yesugei rode to Hoelun on his ger wagon. “Are we out of our time? Do you feel?”
“I don’t like to say, Yesugei, I’m not a great one for gut knowledge or intuitions.”
“I thought you were.”
Jali left his ruins vacant for them.
To take frustrations out, Bultachu Ba’atur and Tayichiut went off to fight Yorgi Wolfhound. By co-incidence, so did the Tartar tribes Tutuqliut and Ariyiut. To these latter Bultachu declared he was there for the Wolfhound’s hide and had no