went on. “At my wedding feast, after sufficient black milk had been drunk, I was spirited away and hidden from Tchiledu under my aunt’s leopard skin, while my kin told him he’d have to go through them to get to me. Whereupon he ransacked the camp and they chased him about with floppy staves and other comical weapons – no-one got hurt, or not beyond medicine, which was more black milk, once Tchiledu had found me and dragged me off. And that was the way we left my home camp, with howls of outrage and shaken fists. – We went back for my things.”
“The wife-fight. I have enjoyed a hundred.”
“Yes, there is nothing like a wife-fight.”
“What do you mean to say, Hoelun? That I face a wife-fight in earnest?”
“Merely that you have done in earnest what we do in game. Or not game but drama, drama of our early days, when we rarely bargained for a wife. Days we keep a fondness for in the cockles of our hearts, from the enjoyment had.”
“This is stern upon me, I suspect.”
“It is just ironic that Tchiledu had to take me by violence too. It isn’t the way to thoroughly discourage seizure of women.”
Severest criticism or extenuation of a sort? Both and neither. Where she said she awaited her father’s verdict, Yesugei saw her stand back and observe her own life, from that core of the self that has nothing to fear. Women have nothing to fear, men say in envy, no mortal foe; his to inherit his father’s feuds, hers to drive her cart into foreign parts, the Great North Forest in Hoelun’s case and sit beside the brother of a savage forest king. Women have a different perspective. Still, Yesugei hadn’t known one quite like her.
While he was gone to talk around her family she might simply walk away.
The evening before he left, his camp captain asked the awkward question. “And your lady? Have I instructions on your lady?”
Is she to be watched? was the question. What do I do if she up and walks away? There was one course, one course only, and Yesugei gave a prompt and hearty answer. “Instructions, Ubashi, are to see her instructions done, as if they came from my own mouth. That’s the beauty of a wife: I can be in camp and out simultaneously.”
Ubashi – let off the hook – wished to indicate his satisfaction. “I wouldn’t say that’s the beauty of a wife, if my wife were Lady Hoelun. I’d say her beauty mesmerises like the moon’s.”
“Do you know, that old moon simile was never so... unextravagant.”
“Very slight exaggeration,” agreed Ubashi.
“Oi. I can say that, but you can’t agree.”
“I can’t?”
“You’re to tell me she’s a turtle here and now or I won’t leave tomorrow.”
Ubashi boggled a bit. But he had a sad history to do with a girl out of his league, he lived a bachelor, and in short he liked to be teased. “From your staff, Yesugei, God speed in Olqunot.”
“Mention me at your daily milk.”
“Why, you’re a right prize, you are.”
“A right prize what?”
Next morning she walked him to the gate in the wagon ring. To see her strong, free step, her unselfconsciousness, Yesugei recognised that she was one to leave him, if she left him, by the light of day and in front of his eyes. None so ignoble as to stop her. The ignoble idea wouldn’t enter her head, nor the heads of those in her sphere, in her atmosphere. Yes, he had seen arrows bounce off that sort of certitude. Stop her?
“I have a message for my father.”
His foot was in the stirrup. There he braced.
“As Yesugei satisfies or dissatisfies you, so he does your daughter. I have met with honour here, in especial from Bartan Baghatur who hosts me in his tent. I have come to ask whether my given fate lies here. For I do not sense I am astray. It ought to feel wrong, and doesn’t. I talk only of my fate, not of other people’s actions.”
This was an extraordinary statement from a victim of abduction. He’d have gobbled out, I have that sense too. But of course, he was head over heels. He didn’t gobble, he got on his horse.
Even after this from her, on the trip into Olqunot he ate his heart out. He thought of her Merqot, arm in the air to flaunt her shift, he thought of him with her shift, with the odour of her. Odour’s as fundamental to a Mongol as to his dog. Yesugei’s rival conjured her up by scent, even now. The sniff is the old-fashioned kiss, and for her to give him... Yesugei’s head whirled. He had a challenge ahead.
Ahead, since, as she gave her father to understand, he hadn’t laid a finger on her. That at Bartan’s stipulation. Until he had attempted to be in the right with her family, she was to stay a guest of Bartan and his sister, and Yesugei was to behave like a gentleman. He did – like the exemplar – and sat with her in Bartan’s tent and tried to prove himself. “So much one noyon owes another. But if Hulegu of Olqunot demands his daughter back from us, after your attempt – then, Yesugei, I cease to intervene.”
Cease to intervene? He meant he butted out. Other people butt out, but your dad’s the one who can and does comment on your behaviour. Isn’t he?
Bartan wasn’t always blunt. It had to be a bad sign when he wasn’t.
From Olqunot tents where they drank milk Yesugei dispatched rumours of his approach. He had come with three of his nokors, a number he thought a guard but not a gang. Jagan, Toroqol and Aktagh were a sworn trio whose exploits had been put into verse. Why them? Hoelun had said, “The Three Steeds. I have heard their song.”
“In Olqunot?”
“We aren’t the ends of the earth. We are only the start of the Gobi.”
The Steeds were there to back him up by song, he hoped. And fight? Only if they shoot me out of hand. A whisker on the late side then, they said. But Hoelun hadn’t warned him he’d be shot, as he liked to think she might, and her folks were Ongirat, they weren’t Uru’ud.
He stepped through Hulegu’s door, which you have to do in a duck, and found them gathered to hear his explanation. Hung about with bow boxes, quivers, scabbards, nonetheless they were going to be Ongirat about this. Had they been Uru’ud they’d have come in hunt of him and strung his guts up from the trees. Both tribes, neighbours with divergent habits, claimed wives from them were well-treated.
A zealous lad of a brother, a couple of fierce-faced uncles, an outraged grandfather, and in centre seat, with a tight grip on their mental leashes, the nearest-touched, her father. Merely the effort Hulegu spent to get the case heard meant he felt beforehand a certain commitment to Yesugei’s cause, because he had fought for him already. Jagan, Toroqol and Aktagh watched their captain at work, where his subtlest, his least cognizant talents lay, persuasion. His enthusiasm for her did endear him, if puzzle them slightly (he tried to say a thing or two they didn’t understand) and those at a romantic age – her grandfather and the lad – gave him marks for how in love he was. In a gradual transition he became not a kidnapper but a known man, a man steadfast in courtesy howsoever tried, a frank man with a very frank face, a great communicator – as distinct from a big talker, for he was strong in other methods. A face that wasn’t suavely handsome, almost average, you might mistake to say, until his fantastic smile (which he had to keep sheathed in the early stages). There’s the eyes and the hair to start up a tale-tell, how he got them, and nicely themed to them, a green velvet hat with bronze band and knob. At his waist a wide sash embroidered with lions that leapt onto the backs of antelope, not to eat them but to mate (legends of tribal origins and our original, ideal state). A narrow waist like a screwed rag, to have the whole horizon in his sights; wide shoulders and arms that nearly tipped him over, except he went to pains to keep them equal and was as deft a draw with the left: the shape he ought to be. Aren’t you just tempted to have your grandchildren by him?
Still, how he may have sped without Hoelun’s message was for Yesugei, in an indulgent hour, to guess, and he liked to guess he’d have sped to a squalid end at the hands of Uncles Dagachi and Babujab. They left to the father, after her message. “Ai,” the father sighed. “Had you been no stranger to her she m
ight have spoken so. – Strangers, of course, you were. I don’t accuse my daughter of a plot.”
Humbly, faintly humorously he said, “I haven’t tampered with her message.”
“No, no. A fiend in camouflage behind a human face he must be to quote lies from a daughter to her father. Hoelun has a strong mind. When I said my last to her and owed her truth, I named to her one major fault, for strength of mind can over-venture into fault.” He shook his head. “And this has happened, and she sends to her father thus.” In a moment, where he had been bewildered, Hulegu resolved into clear lines. “What I have not detected in Hoelun is triviality or erratic loyalties. These had I been sorry for. When my daughter changes her mind... that has weight.”
Next day he gave his verdict. “My daughter (always my daughter) is in-between tribes: wept out of us, nor yet feted into them. From a boy Tchiledu has come to us yearly and we are fond of him. It is not us, Marshal Yesugei, who have taken from him what I gave him. On Tchiledu my heart is uneasy, but my daughter no more belongs to Olqunot. We have wept her away. I am nought beyond a noyon and do not calculate the interests of chiefs and of kings – that is for you. For me, I acknowledge Tangr; we are in his hands, and his hand is in this. We know not: Tangr knows.”
With this surrender to the ways of God, she was his. It had certainly been the most inspired idea of