with him in the romance.
In encouragement Jamuqa said, “Like Sartaq and King Mangalfa of Uighur.”
Temujin had thought to have discouragement, there. He was a nice boy, in spite of things. With bad grannies. “Can you come to supper? Since you’re cousins. Do they mind?”
“I have to tell them. But I can come.”
“Can you come home to Kiyat with us?”
He opened his eyes. “I don’t think so, Temujin.”
“Or I can stay with you a while. With you and your grannies.”
He skewed the triangle of his face. “You don’t want to stay in Jajirat. Believe me. What’s got into you?”
Abashed, Temujin muttered to the marbled depths of the ice, “I don’t know.”
There was a tug on his sleeve. Jamuqa had stood up, and tugged at him. “Come on, Temujin,” he said. “I’ll take you to my tree.”
At Temujin’s instigation they swore an anda oath. Oaths aren’t meant for children, this or others. But Temujin thought no harm to tread where his father had trod, and Jamuqa didn’t falter to do what he wasn’t meant to. In a charred fork of Jamuqa’s tree they gashed a finger and licked the trickle with the lightning’s ashes, since they had no gold dust. Jamuqa gave Temujin his roebuck knucklebone and Temujin gave Jamuqa his copper-sealed sheep’s. With each other’s hides and what-not, head to foot, in defiance of their different sizes, they came before Temujin’s father and the Hirai khan.
“We are andas, me and Jamuqa,” said Temujin with pride.
“Temujin and me,” said Jamuqa with fast devotion.
6. A Drink with Tartars
If a thirsty traveler asks for milk on the steppe and meets refusal, one head is to be confiscated from the culprit’s flock.
from the Jasaq or justice code of Tchingis Khan
In spite of wisps of hair no less ’orrible than Temujin’s had been, worse than any of his brothers since, Temulun was a girl, and Yesugei whimpered over her beauty – which Hoelun didn’t see yet. In the midst he slipped in, “Now, Hoelun, you mustn’t be covetous of my affections. Addition does not subtract.”
“I can share you with my daughter.”
“It isn’t her.”
“Have you taken a wife in Hirai?” she questioned. “Or had one thrust upon you in award?”
Cheerily Yesugei said, “He’d have tried if he didn’t know better. He gave me half his kingdom, but much I managed to give back. I have taken an anda.”
Next thing to, then.
“It was his idea, if that helps. Furthermore,” he said to divert her, “Temujin has taken one too.”
Tired from her lie-in, Hoelun exhaled quite spontaneously, “Sweet heavens. I shouldn’t have let you go.”
Yesugei’s enthusiasm, that had been in a slump, at least the way a snail shrinks its horns into its home, was out to face the world and fighting-fit. He hadn’t been home a month when he was in a bustle to be off again. Temujin had turned nine, and that was none too soon to contract him to his future wife.
At broach of this Hoelun suspected a match in Hirai, the khan’s daughter or similar. But no, he had Ongirat in mind, indeed Hoelun’s clan of Olqunot. “Where I can ask them to track down for me your spitting image.”
“He won’t want my spitting image, by the time I’m through with him.”
“Ongirat have been our Givers of Wives and that is a tradition to maintain. Or perhaps I’m still out to prove I’m not a cad, for mine.”
“I suggest we wait a year, Yesugei. Ten and over is considered the age.”
“Oh, that’s because – not to be squeamish – they’re most often lost before ten. Temujin’s in rude animal health and a shoe-in to see next year.”
This was flippant, almost. Nothing other than the truth, but not to be spoken. When you have a sick animal you don’t utter the possibility, you try not to think the worst, lest you damage the creature’s chances. But Temujin had been sick once, and through his own fault. Very likely he was proof against slightly flippant speech. Yesugei was in a strange mood, since Hirai. He ignored her suggestion of a year’s wait and went ahead with preparations.
Once when he remembered her suggestion he excused himself on grounds that Temujin had started early. “With that poor boy of Black Qadan’s.” The mention sent him on a tangent. “There’s a casualty of the times. We’ll have to have him with us for a summer or a winter, as he’s a friend of Temujin’s. Toghrul keeps an eye out for the boy, but Jajirat isn’t his arena. His mother didn’t live through him. They say Black Qadan was too crushed by loss of her to contemplate wife after. Toghrul said along the lines. No-one’s black through-and-through. Maybe not even that boy’s grandmothers. Welts, such as I’d leave on a soldier who endangered us in time of war. I don’t know that neglect of the milking qualifies. It tempts me to take up a whip.”
“You are sore on this, Yesugei. You can’t take a whip to the Jajirat chiefly widows.”
Crisply he said, “Neither their sex nor their station are a sanctuary to them from me.”
This was Yesugei on the verge of a temper. Not in one. He stood with his back to her, hands on hips, head down, over the shelf with the children’s angels, the felt dolls of his make. She didn’t want to push.
In a moment he began on another tangent. “Here’s where we miss a khan. You’re right, I can’t take a whip to the Jajirat chiefly widows. But cruelty to children has got to be a crime and a khan can step in on a chief.”
Hoelun had a leap of intuition. When she had these leaps with her husband she didn’t sit on the wall. “Yesugei? You cannot.”
His wide shoulders swung around, with the twist at the waist of an expert rear-shot. “Cannot?” He paused. “Flog the grandmothers?”
“You cannot tell people. He is nine.”
Yesugei twitched one of his brows. He didn’t bother with the other. Hands on hips – handsomely stanced – he shook his head at her. “You have me just a feather wrong. I don’t want to tell people. I want to tell him.”
In a gasp she asked, “Why?”
“Ah. There’s the tricky question.”
Hoelun stared at him.
“I think up rationalizations, but I know that’s what they are.”
“Yesugei, I don’t understand you.”
He had his air, his air since Hirai, cheery, offhand, a tendency to flippant. “I can tell you my rationalizations.”
“Since you can’t tell me why, I suppose you had better.” She might talk like that to Temuge.
“He’s nine. It’s young, but then again, is it? At nine most of them is set. People can alter – people can alter at any age. Watch him, he has his character. A character I dare undertake won’t warp, like a jerry-rigged cart, when we load him with the weight. I was proud of him over Black Qadan’s son.”
“It is six years until we put weapons in his hands for use unchaperoned.”
He butted the balls of his hands together. “Let me try another on you. I don’t want him to come across the knowledge by accident. I always tried to stamp out the talk, like a bit of fire leapt the hearth, but you can’t stamp out talk. There’s still speculation about his arrival on the day. Jochi teases him with names we might have named him on the Bor Nor theme. And a stout lad he is, who copes with Jochi’s names. He’ll start to speculate himself. His father knows how to tell him. How to tell him. The how is important.”
“I agree. But this rests on the assumption that the tolgechi’s interpretation was a true one. And that is an assumption you and I agreed not to make.”
Now he didn’t butt his hands, but he shifted on his feet. “This I don’t deny, Hoelun.”
Nothing else from him. “You have changed your mind.”
“Over the years I have come to put stock in Azjargal’s truth, her true flight. We have inquired into her; she is highly thought of –”
“Total stock?” Hoelun near-to-interrupted. “It is, or has to be, your total stock, Yesugei. It includes your stock with Temujin.” She decided to go
on without mercy. “Tell him a prophecy that fails to come about – for omens are shadowy truths and liable to human misconstruction – not only have you thrown him into confusion, but,” she pressed on, hard woman that she was, “you have done yourself no assistance in his eyes. Every father hopes for his son to vest faith in his wisdom.”
Greenly he peered up at her with a half-bent head. In eventual answer he said, “Don’t think me light at heart to forfeit my wife’s faith in my wisdom. Yet am I driven. That in my heart which drives me, wisdom or unwisdom, I can only obey.”
And this was his answer.
She wailed, “Yesugei, you are unlike yourself. I do not know you.”
“Nonsense, my wife. I am being a pig, I admit.” He caught her; she had run at him. “You wish you didn’t know me, for sure and certain.”
“You have changed your mind.” It was an accusation. More than that – a wail, a panic.
“Why, even a donkey changes his mind, once or twice in his life.”
“No.” In the comfort of his arms she jested with distress. “It is Toghrul. Toghrul, his ridiculous goblets and his pretty colt. It has gone to your head. Or has he turned you Christian?”
Yesugei laughed. “It has nothing to do with Toghrul.”
“Then you confess you have changed?”
“I’m as normal me as a pea. And you have the shakes, my wife? You? You pluck thoughts out of my head and I don’t even blench.”
“But in earnest, husband? You intend to tell him?”
“Oh.” He had her by the wrists, fondly, smilingly. “I’m very much afraid I do.”
He did not beseech her to