captain’s lady, I can ask your brothers to move off and leave us space to talk, Yesugei Baghatur.”
Eagerly he gestured his brothers away. They took themselves out of earshot, one front, one rear, and watched for come-backs by her Merqot. Ambush might even work.
There was only the plod of her camel’s feet and the wind chimes on her cart. “Lady, we are alone to talk.”
“Had you killed Tchiledu for me, I had waited for the three of us to be alone, you and I and a knife, and made impossible for you to profit by the act. Before I slew you.”
I think she means that. Yesugei observed to her, “A man extracts a peculiar comfort when he knows he has an avenger in the wife at his hearth.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I saw no need.”
“A sign of contempt?”
He said, “I saw no need.”
“I see no need for your conduct. It is steeply beneath you. You aren’t poor. You aren’t unknown. The Marshal of the Kiyat can have any lady he makes suit for. Why does he snatch?”
“Yes.” Yesugei, who had nodded through most of her question, turned about and began on his explanations. “Because of my father. Him you have heard of fifty times if you have heard once or twice of me: Bartan, who earnt baghatur at the defeat of Hu-sha-hu. What has been done to Ambaghai has him by the throat. More, his agha Oikon Bartaq was with the khan and shared his end. He cannot turn his heart from them, nor give his heart over to gladness. It is a time for grief and revenge. I had thought I must be content to try and win a Tartar’s widow. Then fate saw that I see you. Now there are two ways I might have ruined my life. If my father does not forgive me for my short cut. If you cannot feel for me as a wife.”
She heard him out with two or three sharp inspections of his face. Although he rode twisted right about at the waist to talk to her she seemed utterly unselfconscious, or almost insensitive to his stare. She wasn’t a vain beauty. “There are three ways,” she told him when he finished.
“Three ways?”
“The third Toqtoa King. Or doesn’t a daredevil baghatur think twice to start a feud with Merqot royalty?”
“Not twice. I think of him once. I can defend against Toqtoa.”
“You were a trifle late to apologise, at any rate, after you learnt who my husband was.”
“There is that,” he said off-hand.
“It is a pity you didn’t stop and greet each other.”
“I cannot be sorry we omitted to.”
“That suggests you have concerns.”
“That suggests I can’t think I’d have had the gall had I spoken to the man. It is like Bodonjar, who drank their milk but didn’t step down from his horse. It is no excuse,” said Yesugei. “It just assists.”
She eyed him. Possibly, he thought, she thought he’d be easy to escape from. Possibly. He said, in an effort to charm, “I am not royalty.”
The woman, meanwhile, had determined on her attitude. Indifference to her fortunes, a haughty equanimity. “You have right that you harm yourself, above who else you harm. I was happy on my wedding cart today, Yesugei Baghatur. I won’t be wretched tomorrow for you.”
However she meant him to take this – that he wouldn’t make her wretched overnight – he was the captain of a nokod, the marshal of a tribe, and he judged her in the framework of his experience. This was gutsy, this was not to be intimidated, but more: this bespoke a type he valued highly as a fighter, who lived in a core of self that remained intact, untouched by accident. Often the type were distanced. But she had not been prevented from engagement when she wept and wailed for her Merqot.
At last she became sensible of how he stared at her, as he rode almost backwards, and she frowned. Not shamefast, more annoyed, like a woman who tires of the results of her beauty. “I thought you did not steal me for my face,” she remarked tartly.
“Just then I had forgotten your face.”
Next she said, “Do you mean to lead me on a rope into your encampment, or can I drive?”
Promptly he unclipped the lead. To loose her, strangely enough, instilled in him a sense of possession, and as she gathered up her reins he had a hard time not to climb onto the coach bench, where she sat in primrose silk and half her shift. That intimate, that erotic gift of the shift. She’d have to forget him. But not here and now.
A tiresome spirit conjured up Suchigu to him, Suchigu, at this hour out to milk her pet white goats, with squirts for the children and splashes in their faces and laughter.
Worse, his new lady intuited where his thoughts had gone. “Did you have a wife and lose her?”
A kind inquiry, to get a murky answer. “No, never a wife, in true usage. Though I am quite old, as you see me, on the climb to thirty. I have lived with a woman, Goagchin, or Suchigu is her familiar name. By me she has a boy of five and a baby in the pouch. She is from the Jangsiut, slave tribe of Kiyat. My oath-brother Dolgor was mad about her, but he went to his fathers, far too young, and he charged me with her shelter. When brother weds brother’s widow he does not reduce her or rob her of that which she owns. I took her over on the terms she knew with him. Goagchin has sat at my side and in fact performed the office of a lady of the tent. That is at an end with your arrival, as are our... terms of intimacy.” He creased a brow to wait.
“And what is she to do?”
“Cause my lady no disquiet. Of course she has a roof over her head from me, a ger for her and the children.”
“Your lady is to oust her from her tent, the mother of your children, who has performed the office?”
“What else, once I have a wife?”
“Are you tired of her?”
“Yes, frankly, I am,” he said. “Have in mind I did not choose her, Hoelun.” The name-only slipped out – too fast in an acquaintance, and Yesugei too late to pin on a lady.
For them there was no slow trip from her tribe into his, spent in exploration of each other. But they had their walk down from the hills. For discovery, there was much, learnt of her, to exercise him, and perhaps most a moment at the end. They left behind the hills’ stone knuckles, and in the Turk carpet of edelweiss ahead was to be seen his camp. Hoelun leant forward on her cart seat, intent, and in the way you feel a weather shift, a change of wind or a charge in the air, he felt her attention leave him. Because he had only ever felt a sensation of the mental from shamans, he had to wonder. Later, when he asked her, she told him not to be silly. Nevertheless, Yesugei thought he knew a shaman when one got into his head.
The felt of the gers gleamed white with chalk, laid out in the spokes of a wheel, the fence of black wagons the rim. Twelve gers belonged to his father, his brothers and their wives, three for his staff, and twenty-six were his nokod: men from outside tribes, who had chosen not to fight for their tribal chief but for a captain, and him, by tradition, they chose exclusively on character, without an eye to kinships, rank or wealth. It was a fine tradition, and he was proud of the count that had come to him. At the big ger, hub of the wheel, blew his standard of stallions’ tails.
Before they entered the gate Yesugei paused. He had to say if just a sentence or two. “Although you come to us uncelebrated, believe we are happy in you, and call upon you, a happy spirit to watch over me and mine.”
Noikon helped, bless him, with an old truth. “For us on the steppe, naked to the Sky who is God, to be sincere is more important than to be elaborate.”
The abducted woman rebuffed neither of them, this time.
Dogs and kids charged in from the four quarters. Wives at doors saw her ornamental cart, her silk, her loose hair neither in sprigs like a girl nor put up in a hat like a wife, her self-possessed air and the way she ignored their gazes, and to his anxious eye took against her at first sight. Strings of horses and her shy young camel felt an instant horror of each other. Yesugei found his head shepherd Jaraqa and left him with the problem of the camel.
At the hour she milked her goats, Bartan had intercepted Suchigu and came back with her to the great tent. Like
most grandfathers he never saw too much of the children. So Yesugei ushered Hoelun in to startle his father and his slave love at the vats. Bartan’s noble-boned countenance, Suchigu’s winsome, dimpled face: both grasped that here was no ordinary guest, and asked him by their very silence what it meant. “My honoured father, and my friend Goagchin. I introduce to you Hoelun, daughter of Hulegu of the Olqunot-Ongirat. The lady is my wife.”
A fortnight after the event Yesugei set out for Olqunot. A fortnight was his shrewdest estimation of the right interval of time: not on the heels of the news, as if brazen, yet not reluctant to front up, as if he didn’t stand by his actions. Roughly, what Tchiledu had given for Hoelun, over a six years’ courtship from the age of twelve, he tripled to give for her again – if he got so far.
In spite of a declared neutrality, as she awaited her father’s verdict, Hoelun didn’t stickle to make suggestions... a fact that incited crazy optimism in him, which he concealed to the utmost of his ability. Her father Hulegu had swollen joints, and to his shame and misery found horseback a discomfort: don’t give him the horse ornament – give that to her brother, but the furs and carpets to her father and the silks and brocades to her mother. When she glanced at the stuff on wagon she said, “I’m not cheap. I wasn’t cheap the first time. Was it worth your while to steal me?”
Yesugei tipped his head. But to answer, he’d have to flirt. And he didn’t.
She