first observed by Qongdaqor’s great-grandfather Ogda, captive of Khabul’s father Tumbinai, a sat-upon high hat. As far up as the kink grew dwarf willow, the universal willow of which the shaman sang:
To strike root throughout the world is the fate of the willow tree:
My great, grievous fate is to weep for each soul I see...
Above the twist the stone was naked, a great blunt torso that in the horizontal light of early day wore a semblance of shoulders seen from the rear, shoulders somewhat humped, somewhat tired, but inhumanly strong. He was the elemental of the tor. To him people had piled up cairns and stacked branches into towers and knotted on floats of white fleece. To him Yesugei and Hoelun gave stones from the flats, gave them back, stones that had belonged him, to strengthen him again.
Here Hoelun had a ritual introduction to Yesugei’s ancestors, which was overdue – because of the war. “They forgive distraction, the spirits; I’m afraid they have to; they haven’t forgotten what the earth is like. And this way we can introduce you both.” The grand dames Tamsag and Abaghai Ghoa, in their spiral hair-horns and their ribbon jackets, told the ancestors who she was and who grew under her heart, without a name yet but their descendant. She offered milk to a retrospect of figures: Khabul Khan, Tumbinai, Bai the Bird of Prey, Qaidu, Mother Nomolun. The late and great... to Hoelun’s mind Mother Nomolun challenged them for greatest, even with Khabul Khan in the list. She had saved her people, and you can’t do more than that.
Spring weather is turbulent. Every afternoon for a fortnight a gang of bruise-hued clouds grumbling with their brew slunk up to the massy black stone of the tor. After a face-off of pops and hisses the clouds slouched south, to burst into storm on the horizon. Yesugei sat down to watch this spectacle. Others joined him, until the afternoon confrontation became a camp entertainment or observance. It was uncannily like a wrestling match, and Monglig and his crew of children kept the adults laughing with cheers and prompts to their contestant the tor. But the laughter was devout. Thunder and lightning can harm a child in womb; the tor, they thought, defended its own.
Yesugei sewed an angel. This is a felt doll to be enlivened by a shaman, guardian of the infant. Children’s souls are so easily lost, so insecure; they drift in and out of the flesh; mother and father have to sleep, but the angel never sleeps, and if danger threatens its charge, the mouth-hole in the felt screams out.
With a matter of days to go, when Yesugei least thought of war, war broke upon him.
There came a call to an emergency muster on Urshiun River. The Urshiun is an umbilical cord from Hulun Nor down to its daughter lake Bor Nor. Over the Urshiun lies Tartary. This frontier was kept by the Mongols’ most belligerent tribes, Uru’ud and Mangqot, who lived between the Tartars and Ongirat, a stark contrast to Ongirat in temperament, like guard dogs. Now the guard dogs sent alert. An army from China, of infinite number (they meant impossible to count) had issued onto the Tartar steppe. They weren’t met as intruders. They distributed arsenals of iron and the Tartars princes joined them, one by one. They marched towards the nors. Uru’ud and Mangqot sent around the tribes: Tartars give them the run of their steppe; we won’t give them ours. We stand on the Urshiun. No more walls on Mongol ground. We are a wall.
“It is Hu-sha-hu again,” said Hoelun.
Yesugei didn’t answer that. “My staff – Ubashi, Jaraqa, Qongdaqor – are the only fit men I can absent. I’ll tell them, when you go into seclusion, they assume joint charge.”
They were fairly humourless to be absented, his camp captain, his head of flocks and his door guard. On verge to accuse him, is that because we’re slaves? Or they had no such thing in their heads. “You’re my staff,” he said. “I need you here.”
He spoke to Goagchin. “I understand she is to crouch in your knees?”
“Yes, she asked for me.”
“And an otoshi?”
“The otoshi is due the day after tomorrow. Granny Magsa, who I had for both of mine. This is seen to, Yesugei, and were you here you’d have to keep your nose out. It makes no difference that you are away. You cannot enter, and you’d only prowl about and fret. You are better off.”
That was a definite attempt at comfort.
To her, shortly before he left, he said earnestly, “Hoelun. If... if I am unlucky, I ask a thing. Right or wrong. Name him my name.”
She had her hands on the great lump, as she did, in an instinct of alarm at the weight or the strangeness. It wasn’t right, and he shouldn’t even talk of ill luck. Of course she didn’t like to tell him no. “How?” emerged from her. “You are Yesugei. To me.”
“But if I can’t be there, Hoelun. If I can’t be. In spirit, perhaps?”
The spirit answers to its name. Forever ago she had beseeched Tchiledu: call your next girl by my name. That wasn’t right, that was very selfishly possessive and almost sorcery – to haunt him, to be there, to be there. Forever, not yet a year. “Hush. My husband. I have known you for less than a year. It isn’t enough. No; I won’t name him without you; he shall first hear his name from his father. Come home, Yesugei.”
New life is newly torn from death. New life is raw and wild, a power that doesn’t know our safe and social ways. For her labour Hoelun was laid on raw, unwashed skins of wild animals: the wild claimed her, the dead smelt her out. New wild life; an infant; in equal parts they were afraid of him and afraid for him. His soul has three pieces, that fit together in a jigsaw; the pieces are forever, the conjunction is once-only; you must shatter into your pieces again, like Humpty Dumpty. There is his ami, his creature-life, his breath, that has vivified other creatures; in between times this soul perches as a bird on the tree of Umai of the Womb: flesh is its symbol. There is his suns, the aspect of him that is his ancestors, which also has been used before, and dwells in the flowery shadows of Irle Khan where memory crowds; from his suns he has dim memories of other lives, in the suns is a mental furniture, is what transmits: this is bone. There is his sulde, the soul-piece unique to him, his creation; people have strong sulde or negligible sulde; you grow your own: this rides on the blood. Sulde remains where its attachments were, and the scenery about us is full of soul. The spirits that inhabit mountains and rivers were once people, the spirit of Dolion Tor once lived and loved here. But these big spirits are differently thought on: are they elementals or ex-humans? There are those who want to worship a mountain, in and of the fact it is a mountain. Others see animal mind and emotion as the story from start to end. None of this is fixed. We have no dogmas, no texts. We have no name, only the Old Faith. A baby soul, flown from the Tree of the Quick and freed from the Dungeons of Memory, is fragile as he pieces together and is inhumanly wise before he forgets.
When Granny Magsa triumphantly hoisted up a gangly boy with his fists in the air and his face in a huge scowl, the mother, from her squat between Suchigu’s knees, stared at his stiff, upstanding hair, wet and caught in the firelight, of a shade a vixen might be proud of in her cub. Wildly she laughed, and Suchigu and Granny Magsa laughed like idiots with her. “What have they given me?” Hoelun gasped.
“A Borjigin,” said Suchigu at her ear.
“As outrageous a Borjigin as I’ve seen in fifty years,” declared Granny Magsa. Bloody yet and on his cord she gave him to the mother.
In her hands he ceased to clench his toy fingers into toy fists. From out of his right clutch there plopped a clot of blood, black, as big as a knucklebone. The clot slid on her breast, past her heart.
A voice, sombre, half-known, spoke inside Hoelun’s head. She cried out, not after but with the voice, even as the voice said: “They are dead. They are dead. The battle has been a catastrophe.”
Granny Magsa took charge of the situation.
The mother – a gate for spirits – lay in seclusion, not to be come near. The otoshi had cast a magic circle around the ger and her helper-spirit was on patrol, a spirit akin to her task, ambiguous and scarcely tame: the Uul Fox, who strikes mad. With the otoshi and her Fox in camp the men were unea
sy. Bravely, Ubashi, banished from the great tent, had set up a headquarters on carpets outside within earshot of her, ahead of her fortnight’s isolation and boredom. Throughout her labour Ubashi stuck fast to this station of his in earshot, although Jaraqa and Yegei Qongdaqor found no end of other things to do. Hoelun had a peep-flap in her felt and saw him, saw him tread his carpets and wring his hat; in a whimsy she thought Yesugei had possibly asked him to discharge a husband’s office. Ubashi heard her pangs, and when they were over he heard what she cried out.
First Granny Magsa sent Suchigu away. A skinny finger sealed her lips and pointed her out of the tent. Suchigu went meekly, which warned Hoelun she had a firm individual to deal with. She bent Hoelun’s head to bite the cord – she didn’t have to bite through – she mopped up mother and baby with a pungent water, she crooned a nonsense song, as if nothing odd had happened.
“They are dead,” wept Hoelun.
“Sshh. Baby doesn’t cry; don’t you upset him. Drink.” She spilt on her lips more tea of poplar bud, that numbs to pain. But doesn’t numb to catastrophe.
“You don’t understand,” Hoelun wept into the tea.
“I understand a sight, my dear, maybe better than you do. Have you had sights before?”
“No.”
“No, never?”
“No. I am not the type. I scoff at sights. You must believe me.”
“Oh, the biter bit,” said the unflappable old woman. “The spirits like such tricks. Now, Hoelun, I believe you heard a voice. But these experiences aren’t straightforward and we won’t jump to conclusions.”
“Conclusions? It is very simple.”
“Can you tell me who spoke?”
“I knew her. I half-knew her.”
“Any sense of who?”
She began to shake her head; then there leapt to her, “Mother Nomolun.”
“Mother Nomolun?”
“Yes, her.”
“You have just been introduced to her, I think. How did she strike you? What were your thoughts about her? Answer me, Hoelun, I am on your side, I try to investigate.”
“I thought of her sad and courageous story.”
“When Mongols had to fight off the incursions of Jalaya and we nearly lost the Three Gols and the Sacred Mountains and ourselves. Our worst war, and she led us. In a single great battle she was slain with eight of her nine sons, but her youngest she had hidden in a stack of fuel. Terrible times, and that battle of hers –”
“No,” gasped Hoelun. “No, no, no.”
“Why, she is a crow to caw, to caw of the times she has seen. How can she forget?”
“She didn’t caw,” said Hoelun angrily. “She told me.”
“The spirits are in perpetual talk about us. We rarely have ears for them. In your state you have ears. To her, outside time, that battle isn’t in the past. It happens now, always happens now. But to us a memory, Hoelun.”
“No. She came to me because she has known such a catastrophe. She has known this. Mongols have known this once before. It is as bad as hers,” she whispered. “And she said they. They. Not I or we.”
“We won’t argue over grammar,” said Granny Magsa mildly.
The tea betrayed her: she felt a lethargy, and thrashed.
“For heavens’ sake.” Granny Magsa snatched the baby from her breast, the baby Hoelun had been oblivious to. In spite of her – queerly by now – he didn’t cry. “Panic and you panic my tiny Borjigin, a bird but moments ago alighted, and perhaps he skitters back into the sky. For shame, mother.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. – I need to talk to Ubashi.” This loud enough for him to hear.
As loud, the white witch of an otoshi countermanded her. “If he breaches your seclusion I’ll freeze his limbs and hang him up to thaw. I’ll have no more of this. You’ll lie quiet, mother, and you’ll give your baby suck.”
That is what she did. Ubashi had heard her. It was up to him.
On a nasty set of horns, Ubashi started towards the great tent, faltered and skulked away, half a dozen times. In this exercise Jaraqa and Qongdaqor found him, when next the gutless wonders put in to tip a head and mutter, “How goes?”
“A healthy baby boy with red hair. The mother tight as a sheep’s stomach.”
Froth of laughter and mild curses.
Ubashi interrupted. “Jaraqa, is your lad of an age for an errand? I’m in mind to forage for news. My thumb twitches, and my hackles stir, and I know there’s news.”
From behind her felt Hoelun’s heart went out to him for his agitation: he believed her. He didn’t quote her but he believed.
Jaraqa answered him, jovial. “My thumb twitches too, to pluck my string, and my hackles stand at China on the steppe. Yes, send my Monglig out. Only I restrict him to the Kherlen, or else he’ll end up with the army and tell me he thought we meant a first-hand account. – You don’t, do you? If you want first-hand I’ll go.”
Qongdaqor countered, “The flocks can’t keep without you, granddad, whereas I’m a fifth wheel, when I daren’t step near my door. I can be spared to go.”
“We won’t argue over which of us abandons the post he condemned us to. Young Monglig goes for news.”
Hoelun nursed the baby at her sore and udder-big breasts, while the otoshi droned songs that made sense to spirits and to infants, and boiled up herbs to stimulate her milk or to save her from insistent urination on the hour. She didn’t feel as tight as a sheep’s stomach (used to bag butter) but loose, floppy and with innards out.
The baby’s eyes underwent a change and resolved from dark to grey to his father’s green, as if they had to absorb the light of day. On this idea she laid him in the beam that revolved around the ger, an oval cast by the three-foot vent at the apex of the roof, the hour’s clock. The baby, still no crier, blinked his father’s eyes, with a halo of weird fiery hair. Granny Magsa thought him on display to the Borjigins’ sire.
When Granny Magsa napped, lulled by her sensible behaviour, Hoelun wrought her simple sorcery, her witchcraft. Witchcraft is what you oughtn’t do, though very similar to wizardry. “Yesugei, Yesugei,” she whispered fiercely, up into her ring of free air or through the chimney pipe. “Yesugei, Yesugei.”
If he were a spirit he must come.
At twelve years of age, with a war not far away, Monglig traversed the steppe alone. No-one told him he was too young; he met only those too young or old to fight, invalids, infirm grandfathers, women with children. Among these survivors his status, his promise and importance, shot up, for he was only three years short of arms-age and in rude health. Grandfathers took him squarely by the shoulders: “A strong bold lad. We have need of lads like you.” They clapped him on the back and inspected him proudly, strangers to him, in nobles’ hats. Wives, at a pitch of anxiety, lavished food and care on him. “Most children of the Mongols are orphans. Most of our children. Mine, I do not know yet.” He traveled on, for a more circumstantial account, or in the grip of a ghastly fascination to find out: and Attai Taiji? And the black-bones, Balaqachi? – a hero of Monglig’s. One stern granddad with a leg gone, on crutches, quizzed him: “We have torn our five nails off, we have worn our ten fingers down. What are your hands for, boy?”
He knew the answer. “Ambaghai’s hachi.”
The shock of death shadowed over the world. On a silent steppe only black crows voiced their bleak lament, in the heavens only ugly vultures hovered. He tried (kids’ captain – strong bold lad) not to knuckle under to bewilderment, until he dismounted before his dad and Ubashi and Qongdaqor and spilt out the worst he or they had known of news.
“There has been a great battle at Bor Nor. Cutula is killed: hewn by axes, the axes of a crew of Tartars, like a big tree; the gashes in him tell what toil he was. Attai Taiji with his tiger standard charged into the Chinese infantry. Balaqachi found him on the ground, and laid over him his gilt coat; above him he fought and never left him more. A Chinese must wear the coat now. Bultachu Ba’atur has spinal damage; the verdict is he mig
ht pull through but he won’t walk. Lucky Telegetu, the champion from White Jalaya, has lived up to his name, and he singled out Jali the Bull and Jali’s luck cried quits. Our nokod, by crazy grace of heaven, has none down. The captain is unhurt. They even took prisoner a knot of Tartars at their flag stand, princes or entourage; that and Jali, people say, are the only notches our side of the stick. The majority – I have heard two-thirds, and I have heard four-fifths – dead, almost the whole in battle and not after. There’s a fight and there’s a slaughter. We fought; only those who couldn’t lift a limb killed like cattle. Capture? They weren’t interested. The dribs and drabs they took alive, by their mistake and ours, aren’t.”
Hoelun, intent, up against the felt; along with her, Ubashi had known the rest for days, and he didn’t underestimate her selfishness. In case she had missed the crucial sentence he swung around to her to shout, rough, but celebratory, “The captain is unhurt.” He loved him too. At the worst news in the Mongols’ history, she wept for joy.
In a dim early light Hoelun jolted awake: she heard his voice, where Ubashi had his carpets, on a high note of exasperation. She threw herself at her peep. But a shoulder blocked her, a shoulder in purple silk quilt and armour with silver tracery. The head turned, a face inches from hers, grey in the hazy dawn, with gouges of age, dismal and proud; in the Tartar fashion he wore a silver ring through a nostril, which lent him a haughty curl. Ignorant of her seclusion, he spoke to her. “Joy of the day, lady. If you are the lady of the tent, I believe you own me like a beast.”
Next moment Yesugei put him aside with a hand and a hard eye. An eye that fastened on her, wet out of nowhere. Slurred with fatigue and his feelings he said, “I am arguing with this damned granny. I have met Khazar mastiffs easier to get past.”
“It’s too late,” laughed Hoelun. “Aren’t you face to face with me?”
“Yes. A sight to heal my heart.”
“Yesugei,” she said in an unmitigated satisfaction.
Beyond him Granny Magsa capitulated in a scold: the circumstances, and Hoelun near the end of her sentence. “Go in, you irreligious goat. Go in, go in, before you butt at me so hard you hurt yourself. But my circle closes behind you and the Wild Fox prowls. When you want to come out, don’t cross on your own. Tell me.”
“I don’t want to come out. My heartfelt to you, granny. I am no harm to my wife and child.”
“Softly, Yesugei, softly, on new life. Spare his ears from horrors.”
“Hah. Spare my tongue.”
From this Hoelun understood not to press him. Distract him with the baby. Into baby-inspection and baby-tease he entered as if things were normal, or perhaps more zealously than that. “He’s ’orrible,