Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1) Read online

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.”

  It is noteworthy that our source for these events, the Mongols’ Secret History, now swivels its point of view. This was an official history, ordered by Tchingis Khan, and this scene concerns his father’s abduction of his mother. Official, yet an intimate biography of the Mongols’ greatest figure, with the art of oral epic: it has frequent direct speech, frequent verse – gorgeous as a source. And as a true story, it doesn’t give us Yesugei’s side only but switches perspective to his victims, at the moment 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 naviga
tion 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