into a maniacal grin.”
“With half of Tartary inside.”
“It’s the conquest of the Ordos over again. Knock them out, fence them in. But ambitious. What’s the odds they’ve bitten off more than they can chew?”
“If only we had teeth left. We’re gappy-toothed, we are.”
“Bleak terrain,” put in Bultachu. To a bone adept’s instructions he lay flat on timber planks, aged by the experience, with drastic weight loss.
“Where they are now, on the Khingan line,” Lucky told them, “it’s salt piles, cairns of salt, nothing but. Doesn’t deter them. They use convicts for the labour gangs, you know.”
Bultachu asked, “How are the walls structured?”
“Earth ramparts, a trench in front. In key sections – the avenue into Qatay – they double up with an inner and an outer trench and rampart. Signal stations out ahead and behind, too, in case of misadventure, to warn the rear forts. What’s an innovation is shelves on the outer face, half-moons. Can’t see what they’re for, except, outer face? That’s attack, not defence.”
“Intimidatory,” said Uder Unan. “It’s the function of a wall.”
“They just like their walls to bristle,” said his co-chief. “Muscular Chinese. I hate that sort. I like the calligraphers.”
Lucky Telegetu went on. “Crossbows, infixed. Them mechanical crossbows with rotation-fire, big mothers.”
“I hate crossbows.”
“Crossbows are for those as can’t shoot.”
“Which I’ll tell myself, Uder, for comfort, when I’m skewered.”
Bultachu’s wife Prajna – a Buddhist word, wisdom – she had come to him from Tibet – observed, “This is a project they must have had on the maps for a fair amount of time. When were these lines drawn? When Ambaghai rode innocently into Tartary?”
Mengetu took up the hint, with heat. “Yes. They fought us to gain freedom on the steppe, the freedom to construct. We can’t stop them. They had these walls in mind from the beginning. Possibly they drew their maps right after Khabul and Hu-sha-hu – they want the run of the steppe, not to get out of their depth as he did. With these walls they can launch steppe operations, from way out on the steppe, supply lines there and permanent. Infantry can safely march along these walls. Intimidatory? It isn’t just that they take a slice of Ongirat ground, again. How can we go to war, infiltrated by these walls?”
When they had for a while exhausted wall discussion, Yesugei steered the talk onto Mongol leadership. Lack thereof. “My agha and I have spoken to Galut Queen. She has a reluctance to step into his shoes.”
“Step into his shoes?” questioned Bultachu. “Why, and did you ask her, Yesugei, to pick up her dead husband’s sword?”
“No, not his sword. But his staff of office. The queen is the right person to convene a hur altai, and in the interim to maintain her husband’s government.”
“How did she answer you?”
“Negatively. No-one’s eager for a hur altai, she said, after the crowd in Qorqonag Meadows, to meet and do a head-count. On her entitlement to govern in his stead, she answered that widow queens are a Qatat tradition and aren’t universal. Mengetu and I thought the queen’s take-up is our tradition too, insofar as we have set our traditions of government.”
Bultachu listened with his eyes in the fire. At the end he gave a grunt. “Yesugei – Mengetu – I’m laid on my back. Perhaps I have a sympathy. Of the family at her hearth, three likely lads and their father, she has left the one who was under arms-age. How much can Mongols demand of her? If she can’t, she can’t. It approximates, maybe, to if you asked me to lead a war, without the legs.”
Yesugei made a sad note not to do that, then. “We thought she may change her mind with time, and came away. Mongols have no other centre to negotiate with Jurchen from, but treat with them tribe by tribe, and that isn’t a strength. Our war penalties, which we understood a one-off, are discovered to be due yearly. Little tribes don’t know how to pay twice, never mind next year and the year after that.”
“Aye, but is Galut to unscramble our mess? She’s drawn the short straw, hasn’t she?”
“I don’t like to pressure her in her grief.”
“There’s a steppe tradition, wide steppe, that royalty in office can step down to live a private life. Frequently they did in antiquity, in modern times less often, but to my mind that argues for and not against the tradition. Is that her wish?”
Mengetu said, “She used the phrase, a private life.”
“Then, I’m sorry, I cannot urge her. I’d be a hypocrite, for one thing, unless I got up and went at them, or crawled out to grapple their ankles.”
From beside his planks, Prajna toyed with one of his hair tails on his chest and said lightly, “Bultachu has promised me to enjoy a home life.”
“Bultachu,” said Bultachu, not without a twinkle at her, “isn’t spoilt for choice.”
After this, as Yesugei gazed into his hero’s hearth, half-melancholy and half-sweet and imagined himself crippled in Hoelun’s custody, Bultachu awoke him with her name. “Your wife Hoelun, Yesugei, I hear, had an experience, with what perhaps is a sign for us. Have you been to a tolgechi for interpretation?”
Yesugei stifled his dismay, poorly. “And do they speculate to this distance? Mine’s scarcely unusual, to come bloody from the womb.”
The crippled baghatur cocked an eye at him. In that cocked eye Yesugei recognised he was going backwards fast, on this. He’d splutter next. What was he afraid of?
“We don’t want to intrude, Yesugei. Excuse me if I say I discern a symbol, at least, in that clot of black blood. My thoughts puddle in me, stagnant – I can’t go for a gallop and whisk them from my head. I think about Bor Nor. The blood was stagnant like my thoughts, black, old. It whispers to me, wait. You people have come to me for counsel, but my only counsel is grit our teeth and have what I’m not famous for – as my wife can testify – I only find to say, we must be patient. That from me is news. Wife?”
“Patience has suffered most among your virtues, my dear, since you were tied to a plank.”
“In spite of which, what else have we? Patience. Hope?”
The group of them pondered. From Uder Unan, “Vengeance is a flyblown meat. The Turks say that.”
His other half grimaced. “And they call us garbage-mouths. I won’t say no to maggoty offal of Jurchen. Hang me if I do.”
Moodily from Mengetu, “I wonder how patient my grandfather is, who watches from his cloud.”
“Like us,” said Bultachu, “he might just have to chew on his fingers, and chomp his arm away to the elbow, and hope, by the time he’s down to the left foot, Mongols, once again, can do him proud.”
The Jalaya champion fondly stroked his tasselled hilts. “It is my fundamental skill. I prefer to butt heads. More lively. But if there’s one thing I can do, I can breed sheep. I can breed them faster than they confiscate them. I can’t be starved. I can eat the felt of my tent, I can eat the leather of my tack. I can outlive a Jurchen. I can outlast him. I can out-steppe him. Because he’s a soft-belly, flabby-spine Chinese.”
Noikon took up the hymn. Noikon often got told he perpetuated the daft in Daft Bodonjar – most often by Daritai – but he hadn’t missed the native vein of how to talk in verse. “Tenacity is my epitaph. I don’t drop in my tracks until my rain-washed bones are out of cartilage. Hunger, thirst, pangs of the flesh? I forgot them a hundred years ago, I mislaid them as I crossed the ocean. But my purpose? My purpose floats from my crumbled bones, and goes on.”
Bultachu, flat on his back, startled them with the stag’s bugle that had been his war cry. The two Wolves howled.
“He meant I have a duty. I have a duty, don’t I, Mengetu?”
“None of us want to interfere.”
“That’s what he said. He meant I have a duty.”
“Yesugei, forgive me, I haven’t grasped why you are so hesitant.”
He made half-confession: he confessed as much as he knew
. “Blood? Blood. The Wolves daub blood on their faces, but that’s to prove how unawed they are.” Blood. You slit a sheep’s belly, insert your hand, pinch the tube into the heart. The sheep bleats once to be slit and thereafter ignores you, peers about at other things until his head flops. You don’t shed a drop of blood. Part of that is husbandry, part is sacred dread. “Blood is the very height of ambivalent. There might be a bad significance in blood.”
“That’s true, Twig. But if the sign is for Mongols, the bad significance is ours in general.”
“He is fifteen months old. He isn’t even a twig, he is a nub. It isn’t fair,” objected Yesugei, “to send signs about a baby.”
“Dear, do you want to cut short the suspense?”
“Go to a tolgechi?”
“Unless you don’t want to cut short the suspense.”
“It might cut out the talk and speculation. They might leave him alone.”
“Likely we learn there is no sign. As you say, Yesugei.”
“I say crap.”
“Yesugei?”
“Find me an interpreter of omens, agha. Take me to one.”
“Yes? I’ll start inquiries.”
“Don’t start inquiries.”
“Case histories. Credentials.”
He had swung to the opposite obstinacy. “The first one we run into. Before I change my mind.”
They ran into Azjargal.
She lived alone – alone with the invisible, her neighbours said. No-one was home. Just inside the door, where a sip and a sup are left for stranger or acquaintance who comes by, there was laid out a banquet