meant to know and then forget – go on as if you didn’t know. Am I right?”
“Or that’s the way people behave,” answered Uder Unan, “whether they’re meant to or not. When spirits tell us the future in our sleep, we sort of nod, stash the knowledge in a box and go our merry way. No big deal. No big deal, Yesugei. What we heard in there won’t travel further.”
“Except, the old ba’atur?”
“Wolves, can I send you two back to him? Him I owe, most definitely.”
“Aye aye. Happy to. He’ll be happy to hear.”
“Consider us sworn,” Lucky said to him.
“Thank you. Thank you, my brothers and my friends.” Then, as Babjo pranced along, he thought to add, “There won’t be call to mention what I can do on horseback, either.”
It set them off again.
5. Friends are Chosen by Father and Child
Those who swear to be brothers,
Between the two of them, they have one life.
They never forsake one another,
For each defends, in the other, his own life.
The Secret History of the Mongols, passage 117
Eight years have gone by since the battle at Bor Nor. At eight Temujin has big joints in the hand and shoulder, but he won’t be an out-size Borjigin – they have baby-fat that never melts, and Temujin runs off his; he is big-boned and lean, like his father, rambly, until he gets the muscle. From his mother he has an orb of a face, although the masculine ideal is more hewn or chiselled. Orbs are girly, unless you happen to be a religious icon. Neither his eyes nor his hair have darkened as they often do, and both stand out against the amber skin of the steppe, ruddy at the cheeks in the Mongol way. Green-eyed, orb-faced, at this juncture he most resembles an owl. “Owls don’t figure in the imagery. Do girls go for owls? I want him to be a hit with the girls.”
“Is that the way to get on in life? You seem more concerned with his looks, than whether he has in him a baghatur.”
“No doubt. I haven’t baghatured for years. It’s on the home front you have your life determined.”
There was a sign of the times, but Hoelun didn’t say so. They had been left alone in the wreckage, to be happy; with fewer calls on Yesugei, because of the disaster, they lived a normal life. They felt they cheated – she did, and Yesugei had his guilt. But fate had been generous with them.
The children like to slide on ice stark naked, and not for a dare, just out of exuberance. Once Temujin did himself damage. A Tariat had lost his camels and the camp went out to search. Temujin chanced upon the strays, but a sleety gale set in and the animals, strangers to him, refused to be driven against the weather. They wandered where the wind pushed, so he stuck to their tails, not to lose them again. For three nights he lay out in the sleet and storm, and in triumph led the camels into camp. Exposure and exhaustion they cured with camel’s milk, which is sweet and fatty and hauls the dead back by the heels. His mother and his father found themselves at difference on whether to tell him off or flick him under the chin. Seen as a feat the incident isn’t unusual, but Temujin overheard his father point out to his mother he has grit, grit that keeps you alive, that kept his great-uncle alive on his hike across Hulun Nor... and he is proud.
He lives in no danger of natty silk suits. Silk to him means the antique ujins’ ribbon-coats, a treasured banner in his father’s coffers, the rich days of the past. Among the camp kids – who aren’t, for a symptom of the times, organised along military lines – he is liked, and shoves and is shoved like the others. The children don’t brawl or throw fists, since they never see such ill-behaviour from the adults. When they shout insults they have to be witty, like a taunt session in combat, or else they are scoffed off the stage. Accuracy with your arrow, scintillation with your tongue: these are what have other children agog. Temujin isn’t out of the way for his age in either, whereas his brother Jochi, at six, has a flair for archery and for taunt-and-vaunt. If children quarrel they wrestle out the issue or are put to another contest; when beaten you have to leave your quarrel behind; however, so does the victor. Temujin has a hostility he hasn’t solved with a wrestle, but only Jochi is privy to the particulars of this.
Quite a little tribe he has of brothers, with two years between each of them. Temujin and Jochi aren’t much of a nuisance to their mother – they aren’t sighted, once off for the day on Hairyfeet (his hooves overgrown by his fetlock hair) and Camelhead (a flaxen with a funny, uncouth head). They don’t eat inside but rear of the tent, in the society of a baby gazelle, suckled on a nanny-goat, or the latest in their animal nursery. Mother hopes they pick up an education on their travels. Jochi is as burly and blubbery as a bear cub, and hasn’t red hair but flaxen, like his steed. Next comes Catchiun, which means an oddity, in a fond way. At four he is taught horse skills by his father; he had just learnt to walk, upright and unawkward, when his father took him away for lessons; by the time he is through with him he’ll have lost the knack again, and ride or hobble, like dad does, thereafter. Temuge is two, and either has a limb trapped, inexplicably, in the lattice or has gotten into her hampers and her vats, as only toddlers and foxes know how. This time, an otoshi has told her, it’s a girl – due to Yesugei’s devout intercession, he said. “And she had better be your last, Hoelun. Don’t you think?”
“Why, I feel I have come through unscathed.”
“That is how I want to keep you. There are herbs. Methods. Gut, and I promise not to grumble.”
“I can ask the otoshi about medicines, if we decide we are content.” She was still Yesugei’s only wife, and that was why she did not grudge him children. Head-count had never been more critical and there was an urge to breed; widows of Bor Nor flocked to their otchigins, or elsewhere, but they must be pregnant; there were otchigins with twelve apiece, like prize bulls, who had dead brothers’ lineaments; or if he left behind a lad by another wife, widows went there. It is pious to his lineaments, an after-faith to him; women are only wed once, women say, and they feel the pull of his next-of-kin. To go with a stranger is scandalous, but in these times that is done too. Such was the herd instinct – spit out kids – Yesugei and Hoelun had pitched in with four boys, to match his set of brothers.
But Noikon had been murdered. It was murder: no-one came forward with a claim on him, a claim to fight him or to slay him out of hand. There hadn’t been a fight. They found him with an arrow under the shoulderblade and spoilt of possessions – stripped, the arrow sawn off to remove his coat and shirt. Besides, Noikon wasn’t known for feuds and had none on that they knew of. Mengetu and Yesugei were greatly upset, but what Hoelun learnt from was Daritai’s deep affliction and how he wept into Yesugei’s neck, months after. The brothers investigated outsiders who had been in the neighbourhood. It was Tartar work or Merqot, or no-tribers, fugitives, outcasts, who often slipped to robbery. Once a man from the pugnacious, staunch tribe of Uru’ud said to them, “However, you make no inquiry closer to home? Do we turn a blind eye, if the culprits don’t suit our ideas?”
Mengetu gave the offence he had taken: he struck the man across the face. For this he had to duel. They didn’t lose another brother, and the man conceded with a wound. In fact he said to his opponent, “Needn’t kill each other, need we? Mongols both.”
There were cases that came as severe disappointment to Yesugei, in the conduct of Mongols. Most flagrant, Black Qadan the chief of Jajirat: so unjust was he in management of his tribe’s debt to China that members of his tribe conspired against him and he was slain inside his own tent at night. In abject emulation, said Yesugei, of the emperor of China, that monster Tikunai, assassinated in his campaign tent by his generals and staff, whom he had driven to desperate tactics. Can we be glad, asked Yesugei, to hear of his bad end, when Mongols copy China thus? Less spectacular, yet sad, Tarqutai of Tayichiut, first son of Ambaghai, half-brother to Attai Taiji. Perhaps he wasn’t altogether to blame. Tayichiut dated only from Ambaghai’s grandfather’s day, Jaraqa the Lotus who took his followers into the verge
s of the great north forest and named a new tribe, the Sacrificers. Forest life is more fragmentary than life on the steppe; up there a tribe can coalesce and dissolve. Tarqutai’s exactions were felt heavy on his outer periphery, light on his clan, who lived richly, and in short, the periphery drifted away.
Hoelun was disposed to blame his mother Orboi Queen, from what she knew of her. But Attai Taiji had told her to stay silent on Orboi’s machinations or threatened machinations at the hur altai, and she hadn’t breached that silence even with Yesugei. The Tayichiut clan were brother-bone to Kiyat and Yesugei, quietly, more by example than admonishment, took Tarqutai in hand. They were geared for the forest, without sheep and ger wagons, and he lent them aid in their transition back onto the steppe. Now Tayichiut headquarters camped in tandem with Kiyat headquarters.
Her husband noticed her dislike of Orboi Queen. “The lady is a trifle uppity. Old ladies can be like that, at their worst.” Hoelun must have grimaced, for he frowned. “Has she done you any insult, with her airs and graces?”
“No, no. But she steers Tarqutai, which I have to call a pity.”
“The clutches of old queens.” That led him, by antithesis, to, “We must ask after Galut.”
As marshal of