life goes on... as you and I know, who are plunged in baby poo and so on.”
“Jarchiudai, I don’t know how to answer you. Except that Uriangqot are a people out of the Happy Age and enter into our legends for your open hands and hearts. And I’ll answer for my Temujin, that your Jelme won’t have cause to rue your promise. I can’t guarantee a big figure from him, but here and now I guarantee him a true and loyal friend. – What’s jelme in Uriangqot?”
“Plum.”
“Excellent.” Ah, the sanity. Why didn’t we name ours Plum? Yesugei slapped himself for that thought.
Jarchiudai had ridden in on an elk, with a bellows on his back; he was a smith – “Just a tinker,” he said – he tinkered the holey pots in camp, and he whipped up a pouch for Temujin from sable pelts, suppled as only Uriangqot know how, a dense and shiny night-sky black, a luxury to touch. Hoelun said, “Sable is opulent for a baby’s pouch. Are Uriangqot like this?”
“Like kings, each one.”
“And Temujin has a servant because Bodonjar once attacked his milk-hosts?”
“Even a suspect action can have a nice consequence.”
“He’ll have to be on his most gracious behaviour with Jelme.”
“Yes, he’ll have to be. I’ve gone ahead and guaranteed.”
In the weeks and months after the battle Jurchen proved a point to Mongols: they proved they weren’t Chinese. Infantry they sent home to softer climes, but Jurchen troops spent spring and summer on the steppe. “The truth is, the steppe defeats most of our foes for us.” Jurchen were northerners. The spring winds didn’t hurl them into oblivion, neither did summer’s vicious storms scare the pants off them, though they saw the usual hail size of a cow’s skull. Tumults of the atmosphere they braved, who half a century since had been Wild Jurchen. As for logistics, the troops didn’t blench to live on milk and meat, and that solved logistics. A Chinese can’t digest milk. Milk makes a Chinese sick, even as bread has been known to kill a nomad. “They aren’t a Chinese army. We’ve got that. What next?”
On the other hand they were Chinese and there were a couple of Chinese methods. Mostly people thought they waited for autumn and winter again and resumption of the campaign. Either drive the Mongols off into distances from which they wouldn’t trouble China, or else round them up. Round them up, fence them and use them in their wars. Fence them in the old Ordos, sheep grounds, since a thousand years ago a sort of livestock pen for nomads, and...
“Conscript us in the Odds-and-Ends?”
“Of course. We aren’t the first and we won’t be the last.”
“That simply isn’t going to happen.”
“That’s going to happen, or we’re going to have to move out.”
“What, just load our wagons and go?”
“It’s what a people do when they can’t stay put.”
“We aren’t strong enough. Go? – go through other peoples. You aren’t strong enough, you get butchered.”
“Or you drift, drift into other peoples and forget who you are.”
“I’m a Mongol.”
“Yep. I’m a Mongol. I won’t be forgetting that.”
“It’s the kids who forget.”
“Yesus Christ.”
“Who’s he? Is he a Mongol? See?”
“Lighten up. I can’t swear in my own religion. It’s blasphemous.”
“They’re not going to turn me into a Tartar. In no sense or shape. That’s what they’re not going to do.”
“How do they intend to reward the Tartars? With our steppe.”
“Set the Tartars over us?”
“Enslave us to the Tartar princes?”
“Before that, I’d join up with Toqtoa.”
“That isn’t funny, either.”
Possibly pummeled into thought by Temujin Uge, Yesugei wasn’t caught on the hop when Jurchen did none of the above. Why get rid of the Mongols, when they weren’t a threat? Why give their space, or them, to the Tartars, and beef Tartars up into a threat? No, Jurchen liked the way things were, liked where they have us now. Leave the remnant of the Mongols on their ground, and any Mongol energies left must be spent to keep that ground.
Jurchen demanded war damages, penalties to be paid by each tribe, separately calculated, on size. Separately: not through a central agency, he had been cut up with axes, and Jurchen didn’t want to encourage a centre. Yesugei was intelligent these days. He saw his last of Temujin Uge: his prisoners were demanded too. “Until we meet again, then. Twenty years?”
The man gave an actual smile. “God grant.”
“I’ll have that rejoinder.”
He said, “God grant,” and further stretched Yesugei with an offer of his arm. So they did clasp as comrades, the once.
While bigger, badder things were going on, Hoelun had an anxiety of her own. Although Suchigu had been generous with her (less towards Yesugei), jealousy had reared its ugly head, in the unlikely vessel of Bagtor. Briefly he had had her to himself; she had a child and he had a rival, and he suffered the total-hearted rage of six years old. To vent his passion he developed a whistle-hiss, like a mad kettle. Yesugei was amused, and said she slew hearts on every side; Ubashi was in a similar case, he jested, only more manly at the blow. Yesugei wasn’t much help.
Then, at a stream, she left Temujin in his pouch for a few moments under the watch of Yesugei’s huge dog Tiger – who was proof against wolves or strangers, but not against a boy from the home camp. When Hoelun returned Bagtor had Temujin wrong end-up in his pouch; he was stuffing him in by his feet. Now at last Temujin learnt to bawl, since he was half-suffocated. Fortunately Bagtor wasn’t very efficient. What if he had pushed him in the stream? This was wicked, wicked... and yet childish. Tiger hadn’t been oblivious to the trouble his charge was in; she found him trotting circles and whining in divided loyalties. To jump at Bagtor’s throat was impossible. What was right to do? Hoelun had no more idea than the dog.
Ought she tell Yesugei this? A sense for him cautioned her. Very rarely was he severe but he had been. Years ago he had had a member of his nokod flogged and dismissed from his service. For what infraction? “Namnan flew out of his tree and laid violent hands on another nokor. The captain didn’t hear excuses, that time.” Too often, far more often than he liked, Yesugei felt he had to punish out of Bagtor what Goagchin put into him; punishment came hard to Yesugei and Hoelun saw he was left perplexed on how to love him. To alienate him from Bagtor with the tale... like Tiger, she found that impossible.
In the end Hoelun tried her hand alone. She told Bagtor that for a man to do what he had done was wicked wrong. He had nine years ahead of him to learn to be a man. Along with this she told him he was her husband’s child and thereby just as important to her as children from her womb. Then she sent him on a hunt with Arash – out of his tight silk suit – with a tall piece of work to attempt for her: a white winter hare for her neck.
Bagtor came home from his hunt and suavely gave her her snow hare. Yesugei said he himself hadn’t shot a scrap until the age of eight, and anointed his thumb with blood, a rite Arash had left to the father. He had lost his whistle-hiss. This Bagtor only laughed to see Temujin in his pouch – “Like a grub in a pod,” he said.
Yesugei’s lifetime hero Bultachu Ba’atur had been declared out of danger, though he didn’t have the use of his legs. Fifteen months after the battle Yesugei went to see him, in a band of his brothers, Lucky Telegetu of Jalaya, Uder Unan and Baqaji of the Tayichiut Wolves. “We can call ourselves the Luckies,” proposed Uder Unan. “For you, Lucky, and Yesugei isn’t short himself. Once he told Baqaji and me not to get killed, and we haven’t managed to. Fight with him, you’re charmed.”
“The Luck-Hogs,” agreed Lucky and crunched the face in sympathy at Yesugei. It was the sort of reputation you have to lose one day.
Jalaya had been the worst enemies Mongols ever knew, worse than Tartars... maybe. Maybe that was yet to be determined. Qaidu, the child Mother Nomolun hid under a fuel stack, overthrew them, and h
ere they were, or one of them – a typical one, his hides in splashy hues with silk cut-outs sewn on, and slung with his own weight in armament. For another historical curiosity or irony, Jalaya had been muscled out of their original home on Amur River by the Wild Jurchen, and that was how come they invaded Mongol grounds. History gives you hope, at times. They journeyed to Bultachu Ba’atur for hope, or to work out what hopes they had.
The topic first of concern was wall activity. After the troops, under their guard, had come the labourers; Jurchen meant to occupy new tracts of steppe, tracts unbuilt-on before. Lucky Telegetu had a thorough report. “They’re in construction on two lines. One’s an extension of Arzat’s, nor-nor-east, that is, in a beeline for Bor Nor. The other runs forward of the Han wall above the Ordos, east, north-east, then strikes up direct for the foot of Great Khingan Mountains: to close the gap of grass, to cut Tartar steppe off from Qatat steppe.”
“Who’s this for?” frowned Baqaji.
“These lines control the three peoples, us, Tartars and Qatat. More Qatat insurgency last year. They fork from north of the Ordos, like jaws that hinge – jaws open wide – we’re going to lose what’s between them.”
“How far up do they intend to build on the Bor Nor line? To Bor Nor?”
“Of that we have no idea. Unless we capture a project manager.”
Daritai proved he had a spatial brain and said, “An inverse contour in the north and they can get the jaws