Amgalant
One: The Old Ideal
by
Bryn Hammond
Published by Bryn Hammond at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Bryn
Hammond
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Dedication
My sister has been godmother to the book. Amgalant, what’s written and what isn’t written yet, I dedicate to her, with waves from Tem and Jam, and no sight or scent of a goat. In steppe epic, a steed and a sister are your trustiest, most intelligent and indefatigable aid: the hero doesn’t have to be heroic, but these do.
The cover is Delacroix, Tiger Attacking a Wild Horse
Table of Contents
4. Bad Times, Great Traditions
5. Friends are Chosen by Father and Child
8. In the Mountains’ Sanctuary
4. An Eye for an Eye, a Wife for a Wife
10. A Schism, an Usurpation and a Queen
Back matter, or the help pages
A description of The Secret History of the Mongols
A note on my source
I closely follow a source, The Secret History of the Mongols. It’s an intimate biography of the Mongols’ greatest figure, but uses the art of oral epic: it has frequent direct speech, frequent verse – gorgeous as a source.
My template has been T. H. White, his treatment of Malory in The Once and Future King. Like him, I am keen to tell you about my original, the old master whose words, often, are better than any I can muster of my own. At times I slip into straight translation of the Secret History. Either I tell you where I do, or further along, I think you can tell. At other times I pull out of the action to discuss my original, as T. H. White talks to us about his – a peculiar technique, if you like, but I grew up on the The Once and Future King and on Malory, in his old-spelling, unsimplified glory.
For more on my source, see the full description in the back matter, otherwise known as the help pages. There, too, find a glossary and name list.
The Secret History opens with the Mongols’ origin legends. So do I.
Once a great grey wolf, his fur touched by blue like a cloudy sky, wooed a doe, ochre like a steppe horizon. The doe loved her enemy. For in that age animals understood each other’s speech, in a state of jargalant and amgalant, happy and at one. Tangr had a goal for these beasts in their courtship and sent them on a journey over the Sea of Origins. When they came to Onon Springs on the mountain Holy Old Haldun, the urge to quest in their hearts lay quiet. Here the ochre doe coupled with the cloudy wolf and cast a strange creature, a human child: our first father Bataji.
The offspring of Bataji hunted in the mountains where arise the three rivers Onon Gol, Tola Gol and Kherlen Gol. In the seventh descent Borjigidai, most famous of the hunters, took a wife Monghol-Jin, from whom came our people’s name. With his wealth of pelts Borjigidai purchased horses for his son, Toroqol-Jin the Rich, and the Mongols first left the hand-to-mouth life of the forest, followed the gols down to herd horses on the steppe. But Borjigidai was the last of us who knew how to talk to the animals.
The sons of Toroqol-Jin, Half-Blind and Heavyweight, doubled and tripled his herds. Half-Blind had a single twice-size eye with which he saw to the distance of three days’ journey on wheels. One day the brothers climbed to the black-crowned head of Holy Old Haldun, from where Half-Blind saw a band of people on the way into the mountains up Tungelig Stream. “Heavyweight,” he said, “you have badgered me to find you a wife. I spy with my big eye a girl with a face like the moon. She drives a black wagon towards us, and you have three days to make her acquaintance, before the mountain chieftains lay eyes on her and lay precious furs at her feet. If only she isn’t promised away, I’ll offer them our horses.”
Heavyweight rode down the stream while the band rode up, and discovered Ulun Ghoa (ghoa, after the doe, our tribute to great beauty). Aside from her beauty she was widely known and keenly sought for her skills, her intelligence and her temperament, yet her family set such high price on her that no-one had the means. She came from the Tumat on the Sea of Origins: her mother Barghu-Jin daughter of the chief in Barghujin Marshes, her father Crafty Gorlo, for that he was as crafty as the beasts; but they had abandoned their home, unhappy with the ways of the Tumat. There people had begun to ban one another from tracts with fur and game, as though they owned the antelope, the sable and the wild goats. “Wild beasts are free in the Sacred Mountains,” Gorlo had said, and his clan on their wagons came to live alongside the mountain chieftains Bosqaghsan the Blest and Charmed Shinji, where they named themselves anew, Gorlos or the Banned.
Ulun Ghoa was given to Heavyweight and by him had two sons, Bol-Gunutei and Bel-Gunutei. Shortly Half-Blind went to his grandfathers and left four grown sons who were turbulent and rowdy. These nephews scoffed at Heavyweight – they thought him a lightweight – they went to camp by themselves and took the name Dorben or the Four.
One day Heavyweight rode up to Toqojagh Heights to hunt deer. There he met a Uriangqot – the old people of the mountains, with the old customs – who had slain a three years’ deer and had on to roast a coil of gut before he butchered his meat. Heavyweight sat by his fire and claimed from him. “Share with me, friend.”
“I’ll cut your share,” answered the Uriangqot and butchered his deer: the sacraments of the quarry he kept, the pluck of the vitals with the head and hide, but the whole flesh with the bones in he gave away to one who asked.
Satisfied with the results of his hunt, Heavyweight rode for home with the load on his baggage animal. On the way he met a stranger who had no animal, who went wearily on foot, nearly dragging a boy by the hand. Both had red hair like foxes and green eyes like cats. Heavyweight asked the stranger what people he was from. “Ah, my people,” he sighed. “Our name for ourselves is the Happy Kings, and I’d be as happy as a king to reach them. We are far in the north. I came with furs to trade, but those outrageous Dorben robbed me of my merchandise and reduced me to herd for them. To save my son from servitude I ran away, but I am at the end of my contrivances to live. I’ll offer you a trade. Give me as much of your meat as I can load on my shoulder, in exchange for this my child. Only swear to treat him less harshly than the wolves.”
Heavyweight answered, “Are these the tricks of Dorben now? We have a bargain, brother, and I’ll treat him like my own, my Bol and Bel. Take what of the deer you can manage, and Tangr lead you home.” There by the wayside they swapped: the father walked on with a haunch of deer over his shoulder and Heavyweight, after the day’s transactions, fetched home half the carcass and the foreign boy.
Now Heavyweight left his wife a widow. Although she dwelt alone and took no other husband, Ulun Ghoa three times conceived and gave to the hearth Bull Qatagi, Bull Salji and Bodonjar: unusual children, tall, with light in their hair and eyes. When Heavyweight’s sons grew of an age to query the matter, they began to grumble together out of her earshot, though not for that unnoticed by her. “Mother avoids our father’s kin, where is decent to go if she wants further children. Who can she go to? In the tent there is only the foreign slave, sold for a deer’s haunch to our father, with the tawny hair and tiger’s eyes. She has been to the slave, and disgraced us with brothers who are black-boned, unknown, ignoble. A Mongol has never been a slave.”
One year at the change of weather when Ulun Ghoa was old she heard her husband whistle for her. Only left to do was blunt the axe she knew they ground, Bol and Bel. With the last of winter’s dry mutton on to boil, she gathered her sons at her hearth. Like hunched black crows sat Heavyweight’s get, huge torsos and sleek low heads, arms on them like badger’s arms, with a gaze that burns a hole, with a wolvish shine at night – these the signs of their nobility, the old sacred descent, God’s animals. What did the others possess? Fiery hair, watery eyes: fire and water travel between the earth and sky.
From her quiver Ulun Ghoa drew five arrows and gave one each to her sons. “Can you snap them?”
They arched their brows, snapped the shafts like twigs and waited puzzled with the pieces in their fists.
She drew another batch of five, and this time tied them into a truss. “Now can you snap them?”
In order of age they tried, and strained. Badger-armed Bol gave up with a grunt. “That is beyond our strength, mother.”
Her pot had boiled while they wrestled with the arrows. “Bol-Gunutei and Bel-Gunutei, you gossip about your mother and speculate where she goes, what she does, who fathered these three children? Uncanny children they are and you are due an explanation. I saw him indistinctly, in a yellow glare as of the sun. Every night I awoke to him: he entered by the smoke hole when the moon was high, by the gap at the top of the door if the stars to the south cast a light. In a man’s shape he was wont to stroke me over my womb, where his glow sank into me. When he had done what he came for he fled up any beam he found, low on his belly like a fiery hound.
“Bol-Gunutei, Bel-Gunutei, rashly you insult these sons, call them slave-begotten and ignoble. Bite your tongues, for they are children of the sky. Tangr has sent a sire to our people. What can be his purpose but to rear a royal clan, our people’s kings?”
Meekly they listened, two much abashed, three in dumb wonder.
“Yes, I see ahead. Mongols have been equals, but those days are past. Always the world loses its innocence. Scorn not each other, for there is no creature on the holy earth who has not been sent with a heavenly purpose. Jaya-ghatu are we, pregnant with our fate. Scorn not each other. Each of our fates is heaven’s path for us, and none is like another, and no-one else can tell. Judge not but help each other. The five of you grew warm in my one womb. Keep my mother-love, which is equal, uppermost in your hearts and minds. One by one you can be snapped like the brittle shafts of these arrows; but at one, at one in spirit, who is strong enough to do you hurt?”
On winter’s eve the five brothers sat once more, to share out her stock and store. Bol-Gunutei, Bel-Gunutei, Bull Qatagi, Bull Salji: these came to agreement on a fair division, but they agreed also to withhold Bodonjar’s share. “Daft Bodonjar?” they asked. “If he is a child of heaven,” they laughed, “why then, he is God’s own simpleton. You can’t trust him with an animal. Whatever we gave him he’d lose.” They gave him nothing but his food from out their pots and their worst horse to ride, an old white dun with sores along his spine-stripe and almost no hair in his tail.
Ill-used, elbowed out, Bodonjar grizzled to himself. “What am I to them? A half-wit, and less than half a brother. Why stay? No-one wants me here.” On the wretched horse he rode away alone. “Who cares what becomes of me? Who cares if I freeze or starve?” His tears dripped on the scrappy black mane. “Even this ugly plug doesn’t do what I tell him.” The lament was true: they had followed the Onon Gol down as far as Baljun Isle when the dun with the sores along his spine-stripe decided he had had enough and stopped. Where his horse stopped, Bodonjar spent the winter.
Without a tent, he wove a hut from rushes. Without a creature in his hut to talk to he was lonely, for Bodonjar liked to prattle on. When he bumped into a grey falcon at gorge in the guts of a black grouse, he pulled out his horse’s last hair-tails, tied a snare and caught the falcon. Although she objected at first he kept her with him in the hut and talked to her and she grew used to him. In want of food, he began to trail behind the wolves on their hunts. The wolves were messy eaters and left scattered about remains of their feasts to be scavenged. Once in a while their victim escaped them up a cliff or tree, and after the wolves had slouched off Bodonjar, with stones or other missiles, often got his animal. Through that winter Bodonjar and the falcon ate or went hungry together, until at last the ice was over and they had not starved. Now the water splashed and the spring birds flew in – ducks and geese, storks and dragon’s-feet – thousands past a night, squalls and cyclones of birds. Bodonjar freed his falcon.
In spring he stacked up the dead branches of winter to hang his ducks and geese. Such a glut caught Kill-Quick that his blighted timber reeked with the flesh, his racks stank to the sky. But he never thought he had too much.
Twelve tents of Uriangqot journeyed down from the mountains to graze their mares in the meadows on Tungelig Stream. Greedy for the milk he had half-forgotten, Bodonjar roamed amongst the milch mares, where they gave him to drink straight from the pail. Daily he came at milking-time. The Uriangqot found their guest untalkative, almost dumb: he neither told them his name and clan nor asked for theirs, and never once did he dismount. But his tame falcon intrigued them and they made an offer, the falcon for his pick of the pregnant mares. He laughed them off and told them she was family. “I nearly believe she is,” they said when he had gone. “He has her eyes.”
With spring, Bodonjar’s brothers dispersed in search of him. Qatagi happened on the Uriangqot camp, where he described the old white dun, described Bodonjar. “A mooncalf. Talks your ear off. You can’t mistake him.”
Uncertainly they answered, “There’s our milk-guest. The horse fits your description. He has a hawk, too, schooled to hunt for him like a hound. Where he sleeps at night we don’t know, but when the wind’s north-west, feathers and down from the ducks and geese he catches blow here, thick as a blizzard of snow. And the pong, for he can’t kill enough, like a fox on a spree who’s once been afraid of starvation. Wait with us; he’s guaranteed to turn up at milking-hour.”
When they went out to milk, a spindly figure on a white horse cruised through the meadows, and Qatagi recognised the truant. In his brief fashion he muttered about the anxiety he had caused, and led the boy and his bird straight home.
Trotting at his brother’s heels, Bodonjar intruded on his taciturnity to interest him in an idea. “Agha, it is said, a head on top of your torso, and to close your coat a clasp.”
Used to his noise for noise’s sake, Qatagi heard this with one ear and dismissed it.
“It is said, my agha, a head on top of your torso, and to close your coat a clasp.”
He can’t keep a thought inside his skull. It’s an infirmity. If I acknowledge him when his talk has significance, and otherwise don’t, he might learn.
“Often is it said – oh agha – a head on top of your torso, and to close your coat a clasp.”
Qatagi’s patience snapped. “God knows you say it often. You aren’t squatted with the wild geese now, that gaggle and can’t shut their throats. Spit out your purpose, Bodonjar, or else leave people in peace.”
Bodonjar spat out his purpose. “That camp we left on Tungelig Stream. You saw how fat their mares in milk, and did you get a glimpse of their stallion? – the most glorious silver dun with stripes like tarnish on his knees. They don’t have a head-of-camp, but discuss the least decisions half the day: tried and untried, weathered and raw, head and hoof, every voice has to be heard. It’s called equality. They are easy. The five of us can seize their horses.”
“Seize their horses?”
“Easily.”
“Rob them?” Qatagi sought to ascertain.
Bodonjar gave a shrug or a rotation of one shoulder, much the way a hawk or falcon stretches the muscles in a wing. “Do the wolves rob the deer, or Kill-Quick the dragon’s-feet?”
Slowly Qatagi nodded. “It is your falcon has taught you.”
“Am I wrong to learn from the hawks and the wolves? I had no other to teach me how to live this winter past.”
“I’m sorry about this winter past, Bodonjar. But I can see you have grown up in it. Daft? You are like the beasts, and the old stalkers in their footsteps: you are Crafty Bodonjar.”
For the first time Mongols went to war. From Bol-Gunutei and Bel-Gunutei descend a great number of tribes, often those of inclination to live quietly without strife, such as Ongirat the Givers of Wives, Suldu and Iqira. There is a tribe named Qatagin and another named Saljiut. But a third of our tribes descend from Bodonjar in the great clan known as Borjigin, People of the Wildfowl.
These are the mothers of the Borjigin.
In that first warfare, ahead of his brothers on scout, Bodonjar captured a woman of the camp. Like the mares whose teats swaggered she was fat, halfway through pregnancy: to his eyes she dripped milk and oozed honey. Only now, when he was at war, did he ask who his milk-hosts were. “We are clan Jarchiut, tribe Adangqa, of the Uriangqot people,” she answered. “And you?”
He said, “I have been a Have-not. Now I am a Have. Your husband must be slain, that you can be mine.”
Her child in womb, Jajiradai, the Outsider, Bodonjar fostered at his hearth: his are the tribe of Jajirat, from whom comes Jamuqa, oath-brother to Tchingis Khan. Her next child Bodonjar fathered, Baharidai, the Captive: his are the two tribes of Baharin, the Naked and the Free.
Now an owner of animals, Bodonjar led home a clan lady, an ujin of white bones. She came, as moons do, with a skirt of stars to escort her. To one of these stars his heart went out and they had a child together. But once Bodonjar wasn’t around her child came into dispute; people attributed him to an Adangqa Uriangqot servant of the tent, and Cabichi, son of the wife, cast Jugeledur out of the clan, out of the jugeli sacrifice. His are the tribe of Jugeled, who are yet outcasts from Borjigin.
Cabichi, for his squat size (four foot and a quarter and not a lot of it leg) went by the epithet Fist-Shins; but such an example was his courage that those who fought with him cried him a baghatur, a hero. Baghatur stuck as a title, one given by spontaneous popular shout, and a Mongol’s proudest. Tribes of his line include Uru’ud and Mangqot, named after brothers, who always fight together; Noyojin, or the Do-Nobly, named for their ancestor’s haughty ways; Barola, or the Gobblers, named for the sight of their originals around the pot.
Once the Mongols had learnt war, war did not remain for outsiders. Tribe clashed with tribe, until from Cabichi’s first grandson Catchi Warhorse came Qaidu, and from Qaidu, through Bai Bird-of-Prey and Tumbinai, came Khabul: Qaidu and Khabul were the Mongols’ early kings, that on the steppe are khans, whose whole purpose was to forge the hundred tribes back into one people. Only in the khans’ days did chief not feud with chief, when they answered to an over-chieftaincy. So, in their own way, the khans too strove to create again the original state of jargalant and amgalant, just as the shamans’ difficult work was to talk with animals and with the dead, which we knew how to do at first.
Khabul Khan had a son Bartan Baghatur, and he a son Yesugei, also a Hero. It is his son Temujin who goes by the name Tchingis, when he is khan.
‘Son, what kind of girl do you want me to find for your wife?’
‘Father, find me a girl who’s up before I get to my feet, who’s on her horse ahead of me, who, before I reach the enemy, has heads of theirs to give me.’
‘That’s a comrade-in-arms you’re after, not a girl. Still, I have heard of one...’
plot-opener, twice used in The Book of Dede Korkut, old tales of the Oghuz Turks
Yesugei had been cried a baghatur and been chosen marshal of his tribe the Kiyat. For father he had Bartan Ba’atur, a hero of the China wars whom, impious people liked to joke, Yesugei worshipped whilst alive. For grandfather he had a latter-day legend, Khabul Khan, whose most famous deed, possibly, was to have pulled the beard of the Emperor of China over dinner at his court – wherewith began the China wars. In spite of these points to assist him, and close on thirty years of age, Yesugei had no wife.
This was nobody’s fault but his own. The situation he had left to grow, uninterrupted, with Suchigu had inhibited his father, he knew. Suchigu was too ensconced. The upright Bartan shrank to ask a noyon for his daughter where the tent mightn’t altogether belong to her. His father was quite right. It was up to Yesugei to change his home circumstances, if he had wish of a wife. And he had wish.
He had need. Simply, a marshal’s wife has a great deal to do; wives are trained from infancy, and Suchigu grew up a slave. In effect he was half a bachelor and half not. His nokod didn’t mind and they liked Suchigu, whom they called Suchigu, her pet-name, where they ought to call the woman at his side Lady What-have-you, at banquets. Their wives weren’t always as tolerant, but that wasn’t the crux. Half a bachelor, simply, finds himself half-equipped at times. He was meant to have a lieutenant – aside from Ubashi – in short he wasn’t meant to function without a wife. That was his excuse. It wasn’t going to be easy to tell Goagchin she was out.
They hadn’t been unhappy. In a gay mood Suchigu was hard to be unhappy with. Moreover, she possessed a trait a man never does underprize: you only have to undo your trousers and she is without fail very interested. No complaints there. So what did he have to complain of, exactly, in private territory? He didn’t know. That was the trouble. A sense, an instinct told him, there is more. It’s not too late. I’m not thirty yet. Out there exists what they sing of in the songs. Was he a dreamy-head, to want what they sing of in the songs?
Perhaps he had seen his promise through. He had unworthy niggles of thoughts: had he lived, Dolgor might have gotten over her by now. Forgive me, Dolgor. If you love her yet, then you know the thing I yearn for.
Yesugei, I didn’t intend you to go this far. You can’t live my life for me.
That wasn’t Dolgor, that was him.
The children he didn’t count in his decision. Children from a slave aren’t worse off than children from an under-wife, but both are adjuncts. They don’t rank in the clan. Without a wife his hearth, after him, must go to his youngest brother for lack of a recognised youngest son. As for the eldest, who was five, he could give him animals and set him up, but he couldn’t give him status. Status wasn’t up to Yesugei – a fact, unfortunately, the mother of his children didn’t seem to understand. Perceptions? He didn’t give a goat’s toenail about perceptions, but society was society, and keep Goagchin or cast her off – act of his didn’t alter the status of her children.
One night, late, in his father’s tent, alone with him, Yesugei spoke up. “Father, I start to feel the want of a wife. Both to manage a wife’s tasks and for her companionship.”
Poorly timed. The news about the khan had hit Bartan very hard and domestic concerns weren’t at the front of his mind. But that was just why the matter had grown urgent in Yesugei’s heart, with war ahead, serious war. He had to tug his father’s attention: in fact his eyes lost focus and came back again guiltily to Yesugei. It was awkward but how you had to talk to Bartan, since the news. Yesugei pursued. “Of course, to introduce an ujin, I’d straighten out my tent. It weighs on me, father, that you cannot countenance the situation I am in with Goagchin.”
“On the contrary. Who has said so? Have I?”
“No, father.”
“When he lay with fatal wounds and short of twenty, your brother-by-oath asked you to take his love in, as wasn’t, he knew, to be asked of his brothers by the bone. This you promised.”
Yesugei felt a twinge of conscience, yet.
“And I can tell you, Yesugei, only once have I heard a comment, the intention critical, but to my mind not. It was said to me, Yesugei goes far to keep his promises. He does, I answered, he travels very far. No, I look on with satisfaction.”
“I am glad. Glad, too, that members of my nokod don’t quarrel with how I live, unlike one or two of their wives.”
“Who gives a billy’s balls what one or two wives have to say?”
“Quite, father.” This was strong language, to cite the nether parts, stronger than toenails. He had learnt pride from Bartan, as he had learnt most things. Gossip? Beneath his notice. Nevertheless he was aware. “If I seek to change my circumstances, I am driven by my own needs. And I consult Goagchin’s needs, but the fact is, I never was Dolgor to her.”
“That is a known syndrome with widows.”
“Yes. However, I’d like to be...” He coughed. “I’d like to come first.”
“Of course. The least of us have a title to be first at home, and you, Yesugei, though I say who sired you – I say in order that you do not misunderstand me – I’d offer you with conviction to a queen. The Queen of Persia – the Queen of India – I don’t care who she is, she can thank me for you.”
This outspokenness was like Bartan. His negatives were outspoken too. Yesugei slipped his hat briefly over his eyes, a gesture towards modesty. “Perhaps, father, at the meet of the tribes, can you inquire for me? The meet, I know, is for sterner purposes. But the war we have ahead is just why I feel pressed upon, and press.”
A gradual change came over Bartan Ba’atur’s face; again his eyes saw elsewhere and he grimaced, to see what he saw. “Weddings, Yesugei, weddings? I don’t know I can say let’s have a wedding, while Ambaghai lies unrevenged. It was a wedding trip he went on. To tie a treaty of friendship he led his daughter to the Tartars, and the Tartars led him in a yoke to China. Until I have spilt blood for his blood. Until I have forgotten in blood his tortures and their obscene pageant of death. Ask me then about weddings, Yesugei. Ask me then.”
At this from the grief-stricken old hero, Yesugei felt grossly selfish and hung his head.
Still, he had a struggle to sacrifice the idea, and he grizzled to his agha Mengetu. That’s what an agha’s for. “If only I had acted a month ago. Right now I’d give my left leg beneath the knee for a wife – the like of yours, Mengetu. Or Noikon’s or Daritai’s. Father’s a judge of an ujin. If only I’d left my fate in his hands. If only Dolgor had lived.”
“You have the scrumptious Suchigu.”
“Scrumptious is as scrumptious does,” sighed Yesugei, at his loosest of tongue with his agha. The senior brother is a semi-father, but then again, remains a brother.
“Over-scrumpted, are you, Twig?”
“Mengetu, if I told you about the woman I wish I had...”
“Don’t start.”
“I bet she exists, too. I almost know she does.”
“You’re in a bad way, Yesugei.”
“As I try to tell you.”
Mengetu turned the problem over in his hands. “I can come up with only an old truth to give you, for you are not one to trample on our father’s feelings. It isn’t a true truth nowadays, but used to be: mares and women are what I lift my weapons for. There’s innocent days for you. War leaves widows – we hope theirs, not ours.”
Yesugei thought much about this hint of Mengetu’s. War’s way to a wife might be his only way. His oath-brother had bequeathed him Suchigu; he might have to take bequeathal from a foe.
Then one day, out in hills of a black bubble-stone above camp, a hawk on his arm, he crossed paths with a young couple newly-wed, on that trip together that newly-weds try to have to themselves, from her tribe into his. Though the hills funneled them closely by they didn’t greet him, no doubt because the husband was a Merqot. A Merqot in costume is hard to mistake. This specimen, big enough to begin with – he out-statured Yesugei – wore a sort of helmet-cage, the scaffold for four-foot antlers, and his cloak was sewn over with white feathers. Birds and deer are the Merqot symbols, amalgamated in their tattoos – winged deer – and they ride their stags like horses. He had a horse for this journey, only the one. His wife wore primrose silk, and drove a dainty coach with wind chimes and a handsome black camel in harness. Because of the camel cart in Kazakh style, traditional with them for weddings, he thought her Ongirat. And, because of her circumstances and his state of mind, he thought her his ideal ujin, come to life, just the ujin he had dreamt of for his wife. Her chin, her cheeks, the rear of her head were arcs of circles, with that ineffably lovely, that hypnotic symmetry of the moon – as in the songs. Her eyes were strikingly dark and startlingly light. They dwelt on him, and she gave him a nod for maintenance of the courtesies. You don’t ride by people without salute, whatever terms you are on, but the Merqot did, with an embarrassed scowl, as if he had an intimation, and Yesugei did, with a flagrant stare, because an idea had knocked him on the head.
For things to be perfect he’d have been a Tartar. But a Merqot’s next on the hate-list. Yesugei didn’t give himself time to think: he knew where thought led and in this instance he declined to go there. It was his only chance. It was happenstance. It was too near perfect and you almost felt churlish towards fate to say no. That was his excuse.
Obsessed with the Merqot and the ujin he galloped into camp, threw his hawk off his arm to the first candidate, skidded to a halt by Daritai’s tent. “Brother, are you home? Yesugei calls you out.”
In half a moment Daritai was outside with his whip and his weapons. “Do you need me, brother?” He leapt onto the horse that awaited him at his door.
They cantered to Noikon’s tent. “Hoi – Noikon – your brothers call you out.”
At once he joined them, wiping milk from his mouth. “Where are we off to, brothers?”
But at Mengetu’s tent they found he had gone with the herds. “I’d have liked my three brothers with me for this,” said Yesugei. “But we don’t need the numbers. My target is a Merqot on his own. I want him driven off, because I have set my heart on what he escorts. If we don’t have to hurt him we won’t.”
His brothers glanced at each other. Noikon asked the question. “What does he escort, Yesugei?”
“A new wife, a lady of the Ongirat.”
You can stand about and debate. You can dissuade people who seem to be hot in the head. They didn’t do that. Daritai whistled. “Half of us have Ongirat wives. I dare say they can be mollified – bad match that you are, Yesugei. A Merqot has a hide to traipse past with a legal-got girl. More often he kidnaps them, and he can’t accuse if we riposte. On his own, the cocky goat’s turd?”
Noikon said, “He counts on his crazy shamans to save him. Either he thinks we’re too much in dread of them, or he’s right and we’ll drop stark dead off our horses. Come on.”
The Secret History doesn’t give us Yesugei’s side only, but switches perspective to Hoelun and Tchiledu, when they are attacked. When three Mongols fiercely galloped at them in a gully of the gravel slopes, Tchiledu did as a mother animal often does: she runs, clumsily enough to tempt the hungry with her haunches and never mind the morsel her baby. He squatted on his haunches as he scorched through a nasty patch of scree, but staggered upright, with gravel rash. The three of them gave chase.
In and out the piles he lost them, lost sight of them, and he circled back to Hoelun. But she was upset to have him back. “No, Tchiledu, save your life. They won’t spare you – I saw their faces. Oh, I saw the first one’s face, he had ill thoughts. How strange his eyes, green like a cat’s, and his hair as if afire. I’ve never seen such people.”
“I can’t leave you for them.”
“You must, you must. Don’t make me see you killed.”
“My Hoelun –” he said in anguish.
“Yes, yes, but you can find another one of me, and not of life. Another one of me – oh, but Tchiledu, when you do, call her by my name. For Hoelun was your love’s name, Hoelun – not another. Here, go with my scent. My scent in remembrance.” From underneath her stiff silk skirt she tore off a great sheet of her shift.
The three strange Mongols swung into the gully again.
As she thrust her shift at him he clutched her wrist. “Come onto my horse.”
“Double-weight, we’d get a hundred yards. I tell you, go.” She flicked his hand off, the way you flick your wrist to sail a hawk.
Driven away as much by her as them, he struck his horse’s thigh, to salvage, at least, his life, if possible. They pursued him. The Merqot bent his antlers into the wind, but his left arm held her shift upright like a flag. No-one drew a weapon, that the Secret History mentions. Tchiledu stood no chance, against three. Yesugei had gone to get his brothers to obviate a fight, where he might be disqualified for war, where she might be caught in the cross-fire. No-one need get hurt. They chased him over seven hills, says the history, and saw him off.
She hadn’t tried to hide, futilely, in the gravel maze. Straight-backed she sat on the driver’s bench, her skirts disordered where she had torn her undergarment for a keepsake. Now Yesugei wondered what he had done. Interfered in these lives, and to what end? That she might spend her life with him, like Suchigu, wishing he were the love of her youth?
That thought hurt. But he was too late for cold sense. He clipped a lead onto the nose-ring of her black camel.
When he did that she threw away the reins, and changed, disconcertingly, into a mad thing. She didn’t care about them, or what they witnessed. Her head tossed – her tall silk box of a hat flew off and was ignored – she keened. Keened her husband’s name, and the appendages to his name, so that Yesugei learnt who he was. Half-sang, for sorrows, phrases for sorrows, are close at hand in the songs. “Tchiledu, Tchiledu Giant, Royal Tchiledu, who never rode the empty steppe with empty belly, whose tuft has never blown against his face, now, now how does he go, his tails flung to and fro, to and fro, his chest, his back, his chest, his back.”
But that was what she did, fling her hair and whip her face, her unhatted hair, in the indecency of grief. Images of the buffets of fortune – but her husband’s, not her own. Merqot don’t have a tuft and tails, Yesugei thought in a not-quite-irrelevant angle on the question: a woman’s lot is to travel into foreigners, but can a woman want to go to Merqot? He didn’t pick up her hat. It was a wifely hat, which the Merqot had put on her.
Like that he led her on her cart. Her throes had an illogical effect on him. They ought to have made the creep of guilt more acute, but that didn’t happen: he grew glad again and optimistic. True, emotion and wet eyes in nowise harmed her beauty.
Daritai told her to desist. Daritai wasn’t cruel, but he was indirect. Noisy emotion set his face awry, as incurably as he grimaced at sour plums. “I give you a verse for a verse.
He leaves by high passes, your love who lay with you;
He leaves on deep waters, the love you lament.
Call after him – he cannot hear you.
Trail him – he has left you no trace.”
Noikon swung about. “Daritai, that is for the dead. – We have not slain your Merqot, lady.”
“We didn’t need to,” muttered the youngest.
She watched Daritai and Noikon in new silence, very sane.
Messy. Daritai had assumed they were to tell her the Merqot was dead, until Noikon discomfited him. You charge in without a tactical meet...
Thus introduced to her, Noikon thought to try a bit of neutral talk. “That’s an elegant beast, your camel,” was the subject he started on. “I don’t know what you were going to do with him in the marshes, though. It’s moss or it’s mud flats, up there. He’d never find his feet.”
No answer.
“It’s hard of your father to send you, too. Did they warn you, you’d eat nothing but fish and web-foot birds? And their substitute for felt? Fish scales.”
She spoke. “My father engaged me to Tchiledu, brother to Toqtoa King of Merqot. What’s for dinner wasn’t in the contract, but yes, I have an acquaintance with my husband’s culture. Often thought savage, by the ignorant or those with the brains of a fish.”
Straight insult is outside drill and Noikon didn’t have a clue what to say. Yesugei reined his horse’s head towards her and asked, “May I know your tribe and clan, ujin, your father’s name and your name?” Babjo walked on sideways.
“Certainly you may.” She stared right into his eyes. She meant to be confrontational, but his guts oozed. “You have to do with Hoelun, daughter of Hulegu, from the Olqunot clan of tribe Ongirat.”
“It is the boast of Ongirat that they live by the beauty of their daughters and need no arms.”
“We give wives to far peoples and our friendships stretch the steppe. Thereby my father has no hostilities with Merqot, while I see you suffer strife with them. But that we have lain away arms is poetry. When we are given cause we Ongirat can fight.”
Still the stare contest, and he got the message. He let her win at stare. “May I tell you our names? We are Kiyat. These are two of my brothers, Noikon Taiji and Daritai Otchigin. My name is Yesugei.”
“Those are not names I thought to hear.”
“No, lady?”
“I thought to hear no names and no ancestors’ names. Yesugei of Kiyat, I know of him, but I did not know him for a wife-thief.”
As was habit with him in navigation of a puzzle, he talked to his horse’s ears. Seen in the ears is the subtlest transmission, that might help. “Yes, he is a wife-snatcher, when we Mongols have disturbed days and he no leisure. But from a Merqot I do not thieve. A Merqot owes me women, for he seizes mine. Ongirat in the south aren’t open to Merqot raids but we are. To your origin tribe I am no foe, as I mean to demonstrate.”
“These days are disturbed for we Mongols,” she said with the heavy tramp of sarcasm, “since Tartars assaulted an enemy off his guard and on his way to a wedding.”
This was a keen thrust, nigh on fatal.
What was he going to do with her, lock her up? What did wife-snatchers do, come to that? Keep them under arrest in the tent? Convince them? He straightened his horse and rode forwards to her camel’s head. Absurdly, he felt hurt.
Noikon, in his innocence, said to her, “That isn’t fair.”
A howling innocence, after which Yesugei had to speak. “Lady, I don’t do this on a whim or because I saw your face. You aren’t to be my fifth wife, more for ornament than purpose. I have none, and a captain needs a captain’s lady, for his great tent and for a million things. I ask you, Hoelun Ujin, not to judge me solely on today.”
This echoed in his own ears very lamely. The camel, not grown up yet, lipped at his sleeve, and Babjo – no horse but hates a camel – poked a hoof at the beast. Yesugei reprimanded him with a growl.
“If I am intended for a 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.”
Her retort had a sort of 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 didn’t have the power to make her wretched – 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 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.”