isn’t he? He won’t be handsome.”
“It’s early to condemn him, I expect.”
“I put in for mother’s input.”
“And what is the matter? Didn’t you want a Borjigin?”
“I swear I wasn’t as bad myself.”
“Yes, the granny says he is as bad as she has seen.”
“Does he have a name? Or do I go on with my names for him, which are Push-Nose and Tug-Toes?”
“No, you can’t go on like that. I haven’t named him yet. I told you –”
“Yes,” he interrupted, his eyes in a glimmer for a moment, wide and wild. “You told me to come home.” He stopped abruptly.
She kept to subject. “Since I haven’t given thought... or do you have one handy, Yesugei?”
He shook his head, rather absently.
“Then by the old method: at heaven’s suggestion. I know a Hatchet, because of a near-accident, and a Ba’abgai because a bear blundered against the ger. – Who was that who blundered into mine? Who intruded on me?”
“Him?” Or he might have said, hm? He stiffened. “A prisoner I took. Don’t mind him.”
“What is he called?”
“Temujin Uge of Aliut.”
“It’s musical enough. Happenstance or heaven has suggested, in the hour we need a name.”
He caught up with her, and he frowned.
“Unless you dislike?”
He smoothed out the frown. “I leave names to the mother. Mother’s more in tune, at the age, isn’t she? He’s almost none of a father’s affair, at the age. It’s a handsome name.” He leant and stroked the baby’s forehead with his thumb. Tenderly he told him, “You are Temujin.”
The baby blinked up at him with just his eyes. Yesugei smiled, one of his smiles, his marvelous smiles. Yesugei wasn’t very handsome, just marvelous.
With his eyes down on the baby he started to talk. “When I heard he came on the day, Hoelun, on the very day – I had a thought, you see. I had a thought, I’d changed horses and was about to go in again, I thought, I won’t come out, and then I thought, I wonder whether she has had the baby?” He stopped. Said again, “I wonder whether she has had the baby?” He touched his face, touched his scalp. “That was around the fourth of afternoon. Had you had him?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “I found my nokod a job to do. I told them, there’s a flag stand of Tartar bigwigs; I want them alive. Alive is a lot more tricky. Kept them focused for hours, hours until... until night, in fact, and those of us... those of us... we came away. A little battalion of us, I got them together, in fact, and we, what do they say in wrestling, in the melee? The gentlemen declared and stepped out of the ring. Fancy, this one’s a few days old and he’s saved his father’s life.”
With great ambivalence he said so. She ventured to say, “I am glad.”
He gave a half-nod, and they left off talk of that. “Temujin, then?” He contemplated.
“The stalk is iron. Temur, Turkic for iron; bitten off, as Mongols slur, and seldom bother to say baghatur but baa like sheep.”
“Iron. That – forgive me – is an irony.”
“Dear, dear. – Perhaps we had to name him for events, since he had to arrive at such a time. I am sorry if you didn’t want a reminder. We can at once give him an alternate name and never speak his first more.”
“I listen to a reminder. There was the sea of infantry in front of us or off to the side there was the flag stand. You might have named him Flag Stand.”
“We can call him Flag Stand.”
“It’s a name I can learn to love. Hoelun.”
Privately to his nephew Cutula had said, “This isn’t the way we unstitched the infinite army of Hu-sha-hu.”
“No.”
His uncle had a ball of white where frost had nipped one eye. It disconcerted you to talk to. “You’ve got to fight with the sentiment, Yesugei. No use to fight against.”
Did Yesugei speak up, or argue? No.
Unlike the Chinese we don’t degrade, disgrace and decapitate our military leaders for failure. It’s a disincentive, as no few Masters of Light Chariots or Swift Cavalry have found: oops, lost one, I’ll have to defect to the Huns. It isn’t Cutula’s fault. He was right, you have to fight with the sentiment, and the sentiment, strongly, throbbed to Uru’ud and Mangqot’s slogan, No walls. We are a wall.
We are a wall?
We are not a wall. We’re a flock of birds, we wheel away into spaces as vast as the air, to kill us you have to catch us first; but we’ll swoop at you out of the blue when you’re footsore, fatigued and off-guard. They had let infantry overtake them. There was just no excuse for that.
We were angry.
The Borjigin fire-heads were known for a fiery temperament and had to tutor their young in control. Bartan taught him: ride your anger, don’t allow your anger to ride you. Can be learnt, I know from experience. He had never seen his father in a violent temper. “But I was a great sinner that way, Yesugei, before I was grown up enough to have you. Khabul told me, there’s the thunder and lightning in us, since we are sky-begotten; dangerous stuff, thunder and lightning, wrongly employed. Employ them as God intended, for they aren’t without utility, much as we frown upon a temper. Mind not to do as did the original shaman, who grew proud and like an ingrate challenged Tangr. Nothing worse than a heavenly gift abused. You get upset at the right things, Yesugei, and that augurs for you.”
His father had died of grief, or indignation. It’s hard to distinguish. At Bor Nor, once they understood the battle was disastrous, no-one tried to be exempt, exempt from the general fate of the Mongols, the fate of their lions and stalwarts: who am I to live? Yesugei knew; he had felt the sway of the general mood, he had thought who am I to live? God strikes us down today. I have no argument. I have a last wish, a last testament: my bones be found with these my comrades’ bones, with these I admire. United we stand, and let us fall united.
Is that angry? Is that magnificent? Is that the end of the Mongols? Yes, yes and maybe.
How was he going to live with the fact he had lived?
Death is only transition into a spirit. Death is only to meet your ancestors face to face and be fed on sacrificial meats by your descendants. Spirits are omniscient, and travel freely through time and space, to the stars. Perhaps we need a hell, to put us off. Christians, quite seriously, think twice. His father – Yesugei wailed on the inside – for instance, were he a Christian, hadn’t found pious to drop his bones by Ambaghai’s. I’m a great sinner that way. Him, and the feast for the scavengers Yesugei had seen at Bor Nor. What of our heroes? – No harp to awaken them, but the dark raven, drawn to the fey, he chatters, and asks the eagle how he sped when he spoilt the slain with the wolf.
You have to put it in poetry. Don’t you? Yesugei hadn’t witnessed a big pitched battle before, whether from the win side or the lose side. He witnessed why the steppe avoids them – like the plague, like the plague on a big scale. Have you ever been into a plague ger, when no-one’s alive and they sterilize by fire? No, he hadn’t done that either. Those who lived through one, he honestly didn’t know how they were ever to be towed into another. Still, there wasn’t much prospect of that.
Death, hot, and in chase of your comrades: oi, you lot, Tomdol, Ultantaz, wait for me. Death, cold, mass, indiscriminate, and torn by beaks. Survivors, for their punishment, have the worst sight.
Kill them like cattle.
That was one option, what to do with his prisoners, and Yesugei had nothing much against. It was only that he had instructed his nokod to take them alive, for which he might have to invent a reason. They had liberty of movement – so far – he had sworn them on their mothers’ and grandmothers’ graves: obey him, do him no harm. They were Tartars, but he supposed they understood an oath. “It’s that or the yoke,” he had said. “Which do you like?”
The one Hoelun had named his son after (that did cause him difficulty, difficulty in use of the name to each of them, that gave him a stutt
er) was head and shoulders the figure of the group – not in rank, in character, of which he had more than his share. And he didn’t hold back on character out of caution about the cattle option. He was often found in Yesugei’s path, to lock horns with him.
“Who is the lady with the ram’s horns who goes by?”
“That is my Aunt Tamsag.”
“As I thought. Khabul’s daughter.” He smiled his sardonic smile. “Tell her – unless my notice is ignominy – she has not changed out of recognition since her blossom days.”
“You have met?” asked Yesugei reluctantly.
“It was in aid of her husband our famous shaman Tchogor came, to try his cures. For a year Kharju had languished, his soul absent, lost; in vain your shamans had voyaged to the ends of the earth, searched the bottom of the sea, scoured through the dead, confronted Irle Khan. Tchogor came, and had found spoor, on a short investigative flight, when Kharju gave up the ghost. The spirit who imprisoned him, who had feasted on him slowly, gobbled him up, as soon as he saw our shaman on the case. Tchogor told his clients this for truth, but the truth did not save him. On his journey home, his disappointed clients had him murdered.”
“The tale I grew up with has a murder in it. But not of the great healer Tchogor, nor out of petty spite but vanity, when he saw he must fail in a cure; and that he met his end on his way home was thought God’s justice here. If you were of Tchogor’s party I shan’t introduce you to my aunt.”
“Old murders are hard to unriddle.”
“There are more recent deaths that are more plain.”
“True. Though not my tribe, Yesugei Kiyat, sold your king. You Mongols can’t pick one Tartar from another. You should, since Tartars do, to a fault.”
“To our eye there is intricate in-fight without difference. None of your tribes, for example, said no to China. None came instead to stand by us.”
“Stand by you?”
“Ridiculous, is that? Ridiculous for steppe peoples to stand together?”
“I don’t know about ridiculous.” The princely captive ran a finger down a groove in his jaw. “Suicidal, yes, and I don’t mean China, I mean our reception with you.”
“I’d have clasped your arm for a comrade, Temujin Uge.”
“Out of a Mongol mouth,” he wondered to the air. “Curses and spittle I have had out of Mongol mouths, since Ambaghai.”
“Yes, I’d have clasped your arm,” Yesugei pursued. “Because I remember Ambaghai. Have you stopped to ask, what was the purpose behind his death, his hideous death? What was the purpose?”
“I have asked that question, Yesugei Kiyat.” His interest was engaged. “I had not thought the Mongols paused to ask. It’s odd, at a time Mongols were quiet and only jealously watched the border against encroachment. Ambaghai gave no sign of bellicosity towards China, and their shipments of silk to you were piddling. Why did they do it?”
“You see why too.” No-one else did. No-one else had had the chance; he had figured things out on the way back from Bor Nor. You have to have the hindsight. It made such sense in hindsight, the sense of the snap of a trap.
“At first glance, gross misjudgement, gratuitous incitement. In hindsight a masterly strategy. One act, a sequence of effects. Mongols too enraged to be rational. Tartars too frightened to say no. Where do they have us now?”
“Us? Now you say us?”
“I do, Kiyat, when we have Chinese soldiers intermingled with our flocks. You frightened us in the winter; we had to co-operate with them or face up to you alone. Co-operation costs, and we are in an intimacy tighter than we were.”
“In Ambaghai Khan’s future you and me might have been friends.”
“Your Ambaghai I didn’t meet, but we feel we knew him. We knew him an idealist, and dangerous, as idealists are. Clearly he upset the Jurchen even more than did Khabul – who only mocked them and went to war against them – whereas Ambaghai tried to wed into his enemy. Yes, that was far more dangerous. To Jurchen, and therefore to us. The dirty work had to be done. By Yorgi Wolfhound, but you are right: Tartars, whatever their tribe, understood the dirty work had to be done. And no, Yesugei Kiyat, we did not come to stand with you in your self-destruction. Tartars have learnt how to survive.”
Yesugei kept his spittle in his mouth and spoke through his teeth. “Our king isn’t the first king whose blood is on your hands. Marquz Khan of Hirai. China can depend on you, depend on you to be traitors to the steppe.”
“Yes, Kiyat, but again, ask why. You’ve had the intelligence to ask why. Do you think this hasn’t happened to us? Have you forgotten? We had a great king, Mogusi, who overran the Iron Khans’ occupation-town on the Orqon, who seized our stolen graze-grounds back. They caught him, they hacked him apart at the joints, and they fragmented us. Ever since they have kept us in fragments. Now you have been broken in battle. Not every Tartar is happy to lose his fathers’ traditions and watch the corruption of his people. But there is no people who have lived within reach of China and remained uncorrupt. No people. You Mongols – you savages, you are scarcely out of the woods, and you have lived behind us while we live up against the Wall. But under your three khans you began to poke your heads out into the big world. Wait and see, Yesugei Kiyat. In twenty years’ time, God grant, I’ll take up with you our discussion of today, and I’ll ask you what has become of your independence, your dignity, your fathers’ traditions, and of your moral outrage and of your moral high ground.”
At least young Temujin had been named after a cogent, incisive sort who can keep up his end of an argument. Yesugei’s head rang as if from punches. “Temujin Uge,” he said, “I’m a busy man. Can we adjourn this til twenty years’ time? When I just might startle you and have an answer.”
Temujin senior smiled his smile and stepped out of his path. “I look forward to resumption.”
“Not altogether unequivocal on whether I do,” he muttered as he and Ubashi, who had been there throughout, walked on. “Did I lose that argument?”
“Very hard to tell. Bit intense for me. What I told from that is, he hasn’t got enough to do. Idle hands. How about I fix that? There’s the hair for the felt wants a sift.”
“Can Tartar royalty turn his hand to felt? He has left felt for silk.”
“I’ll shortly re-teach him his traditions.”
“If you don’t mind him messing up your sift, Ubashi, you can have him.”
“In the fancy armour?”
He sighed. “No, I’ll divest them of the fancy armour. Time I gave out the wages.”
“They grow in, Yesugei.”
“Hm?”
“They grow in. Maybe my granddad was as much a misfit about camp, in the early days. Employment’s a start.”
This was a timely comment. It struck Yesugei that he was glad his granddad hadn’t gone the cattle option with Ubashi’s granddad. Too late, anyhow, after you’ve argued, which feels tantamount to an acquaintance. At least Uge’s a perfectly Tartar title, not bastard Chinese. He flung an arm around Ubashi’s shoulders. “It’s a stretch to imagine the Uge’s grandkids grown in to be a vital organ, Ubashi, like you. But you’re right.”
That his wife had had a sight didn’t astound him. It tallied his end: she had been in contact with where he was and that was how he knew about the baby, though he didn’t know he knew, he thought he wondered. His wife’s clairvoyance – a talent he believed hers and not merely to do with her state – had caught him like a fish on a hook and reeled him home. None of this disturbed him, this was cosy. This belonged at his domestic hearth, but people began to speculate upon his son, the time he had come, the clot of blood he had come with in his tiny fingers, and on his name.
“You’ve named him in trophy of your prisoner?”
It wasn’t quite like that. My prisoner isn’t much to boast of. I don’t know whether he’s flattered.
“You and Lucky Telegetu, you gave us an inch of victory in a rim horizon of defeat. It’s you we followed out, Yesugei, the few of us who got
out. I can’t feel bad about that. I can, to be frank with you, and I nearly joined the honour-guard, but we can do them honour. A few of us live to fight again, to fight again in memory of our dead. And that’s what you told them, Yesugei, when you went against the tide and annoyed them, which meant to me, too, Yesugei, the war doesn’t end here. The war isn’t over. And I came away with you. I don’t know, Yesugei, just you the odd one out, and none down – none down, that staggers belief, and I found a belief again. I felt a finger’s touch on my nape, a spirit of ours, and our spirits must have been with you, to salvage us an inch of luck or grace. And why you, if fate was such that our spirits’ utmost only ran to an inch? Your kid. How’s a baby, a young Mongol, on the day? He’s our spot of optimism.”
Our spot of optimism was his son, innocent in his pouch, with his soft fiery scalp and big, solemn, owlish eyes. Yesugei grew the bristling stance of a guard dog. He didn’t quite know why, or what he was afraid of.
And the clot of blood, a black clot in his right hand? What did that signify?
It signifies, perhaps, there’s blood involved when a child comes out and us men have the right idea to steer clear.
God has struck us down.
Tangr warned us. Over winter, nothing went our way. He warned us; our fault we didn’t listen.
Has God forsaken us?
Did God send us a sign? A sign, even at time of battle, even in his blasts? Our cause was not unjust. We are short-sighted, he is far-sighted. We don’t know: he knows.
What Yesugei heard he understood, in his depths, an ache in his bones, a tremble in his bowels: is there hope? But that was why he got the pip with this talk.
Once, out to consult in other circles, a stranger said to him, seriously or otherwise, “To give him your vanquished enemy’s name? Ancient enchantment, marshal. It transfers to him the Tartar’s strength – transfers his spirit, just the way you pour the milk brandy from one bag into another. The one shrivels up, the other thrives for two.”
Heaven help him. Not the Tartar.
In his botheration he had a visitor, a fellow new father who came to commiserate with him, or to be giddy together at this inconvenient time to be a new father. “I heard of your plight, Yesugei, and I thought, there’s a man in a muddled-up situation, like mine. I go about with this absurd grin and I get the funny glances. Do you find?”
Yesugei found he was fervently glad to meet him. “It’s a brilliant idea, that you came. Stay a bit, won’t you?”
“Matter of fact, Yesugei, I’ve had an inspiration. Because of the coincidence, yours and mine. In old times my clan Jarchiut yearly dedicated a child to your clan, a tribute owed from our erstwhile captivity. Here’s a descendant of our captor and no mistake. Inspiration struck: to observe the dead custom and promise mine, at age, into the service of yours. In your service ours have always found adventure and often fortune. It’s a start in life. Our fortunes in the late war notwithstanding,