Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1) Read online

his life, to seize her, when he saw her.

  They dedicated the day to a carousal, fueled by a huge cauldron and spirits-of-milk. Gratitude obliged Yesugei to dive head first into the distilled milk and he didn’t disappoint. Jagan, Toroqol and Aktagh felt a duty not to leave their captain to drink alone, no more than fight alone. Yesugei essayed to seduce her mother, which is the done thing, and besides she wasn’t half bad, if she were a hint of Hoelun in her ripe age with him. He blathered about his luck. Hulegu didn’t suffer him to be the only gift-giver: for Yesugei there was an eagle, a superb bird the size of his torso, and for Bartan a treasure, a brooch for his hat, a bull in bluestone and silver with walrus-ivory horns. By that night’s moon her dad, his dicky knees strapped up to stand at ease in his stirrups, led them on a mad gallop for sheer spirits, milk or their own. No-one got hurt.

  Bartan lived in and between the gers of his sister Tamsag and an under-wife of his, who at the age of sixty people hadn’t forgotten to call Abaghai Ghoa, after the Mongols’ mother doe, a tribute to beauty. These grand dames – Tamsag a daughter of Khabul Khan, Abaghai of his ally the Falcon Chief – were at the turret of the tribal aristocracy. Like stallions, their hair had never been cut; by means of a wood frame, grease and copper clamps they created huge spiral horns of hair at the sides of their heads in mimicry of mountain argali rams, an old-fashioned coiffure with a stately, untamed effect. They wore short jackets of silk ribbon in stripes, like the bridge in the sky. Hoelun paid them their due of deference and found them quite free from airs. They had enjoyed their lives and ended up jolly. They yarned for hours; at water they liked to fish, a queer sort of sport to most on the steppe, acquired by the Falcon Chief while a prisoner of the Oirat. They didn’t bother their heads much about Hoelun. In anticipation, however, of her enstatement as Yesugei’s lady, they took her to visit a neighbour’s hattery and pick out a hat. The neighbour had a dozen in use and several under construction, amid braid and cockades, nets and aigrettes. Hoelun went for a simple forget-me-not blue spire, of light but sturdy bark, which she undertook to elaborate upon.

  She had lost Tchiledu’s hat.

  She sat with Yesugei’s beside her, and no hat on. The wifely high hat: which was she a wife to?

  No-one she talked to in camp neglected to insert a testimonial to Yesugei. The head shepherd Jaraqa battered her ear on the theme for upwards of four hours, under the guise of a tour of the flocks. The camp captain Ubashi, though shy with her, managed to convey a great deal of information on how he earnt his honours. Bartan, the other Hero in the camp, did not defend his son’s actions to her. In fact she suspected him to be unhappy with them, although he gave slight indication of that either. But he commended Yesugei at the expense of heroes in general. “Baghaturs make bad chiefs, notoriously. Now and then the twain can meet. Yesugei was never flamboyant for the sake of flamboyance. Even what got him cried, see, was a grim need-to-do, whereas to your straight-up baghatur, the more gratuitous the feat the better. Yesugei doesn’t muck about, and there’s the chief in him.”

  It was unusual for four brothers to live together with their father – throughout the year, as she learnt they did. On this she questioned Mengetu. In answer he assured her she didn’t have to always if she didn’t want to. “Whenever we feel the need of elbow-room, us brothers or a wife, we take ourselves off to be ourselves. A week or a month, a summer or a winter. Me and mine have. What’s space for, but to put between people?”

  As a matter of fact the marshal’s wife mightn’t find herself thus free, but she didn’t say so. “I was simply curious. Big congregations are less efficient.”

  “We enjoy a congregation, and can afford a little inefficiency. We’re the wolf family who hang together while they can squeeze in around the feast. Until they tread on each other’s toes, soon or late. Happens late, in a harmonious family.”

  “Even if they do not chafe, there is an urge for independence, that tends to strike at the age of independence.”

  “There is. But at the time I came of age, and Noikon and Yesugei after me, there was our grandfather. Unity was in the air.”

  Khabul Khan, renowned as a drunk and a clown, also as a visionary: before him the name Mongol wasn’t much in use, only the names of tribes.

  The second brother Noikon was one of those of whom people say a straightforward soul or like a child in the world. And that description dangerously encroached on how she had to describe Yesugei... from the anecdotes they told her. Once and twice and three times, in the anecdotes, he staked his cause, his friends, his life on people’s scruples. Not people he had an opportunity to judge, or who had a duty to him, but the neutral and unknown. These incidents were stressed, as characteristic of him, as his quirk, as why they liked him.

  Naivety?

  The naivety of a man without a flyspeck of knavery himself. On the steppe the sky is a vast transparent blue, unfogged by sea. A Mongol is as honest as the sky is blue, Mongols like to say. No doubt what she saw as a fault was enmeshed with his attractions; the proof was in his nokod; more than skill in captaincy and freehandedness with spoils went towards the cult. They came from twenty different tribes and they chose him on his worth.

  But his worth wasn’t the argument for her. She wasn’t a free warrior, to bestow her loyalty – she was Tchiledu’s wife, and wives don’t transfer, whomever they meet, or they are indecent. Did she have a fate here? Did she need to believe she had a fate? To feel drawn to Yesugei, to feel – yes – even a physical draw: either she was a deeply indecent woman, or else she had a fate.

  In songs were women like her, women uncertain of whose hat to wear. Kidnapped women were a common theme for songs. One went around like a wheel in her head. One of those crux-songs: no narrative, or very little, to tell you how the situation came about; an abrupt beginning, and terse conclusion – only the agony.

  His head is forfeit, fair game for my clan:

  If he comes, they have means to meet him.

  Otherwise is it with us.

  Wolf dwells on an island, I alone on an isle.

  Strong is his sanctuary, circled by marsh;

  They stake it out, thirsty for slaughter.

  If he comes, they have means to meet him.

  Otherwise is it with us.

  My spirit wandered far away with Wolf,

  When it rained into the river and I sat to weep,

  When the greedy eagle glutted on his catch –

  Though I hungered for that, I hated it too.

  Wolf, my Wolf, my yearning for you

  Is what wastes me away, the rare sight of you,

  Heart’s misery, not how they famish me.

  Do you hear, husband? Our unhappy whelp

  Will be prey for the wolf in the woods.

  It is easy to tear what was never together:

  The tale of our love, untold.

  Obscure, a segment from an epic in close focus; she didn’t know the story of this disputed woman, who at least felt like a prisoner. But they always do. It’s always a self-conflict, a log-jam of claims or of loves; two courses, both strongly felt, neither of them altogether right nor altogether wrong; often violence erupts at the end, often chests lost grip on the uproar of hearts. Tragedy. With Yesugei away her thoughts were grim. Feuds and affairs of honour: she didn’t want to wind up in a song. She had no idea whether the woman, in the last lines, were about to kill her child, or what; she didn’t want to know. Now, there needn’t be a tragedy, let’s be sensible. That didn’t often work.

  When Yesugei rode into sight with a great eagle she recognised on a cantle-perch and his three nokors in laughter beside him, she knew who her husband was.

  Bartan Ba’atur took her on his arm to the great tent, kissed the sides of her face, also kissed the sides of Yesugei’s, which cheered Yesugei up. Bartan wore his bull brooch from Hulegu and she wore her new blue hat.

  So Yesugei and she were shut into the tent. Even his door guard Qongdaqor, who lived on the threshold (wife and child in a ger nearby) slept on the outside tonight. The hearth fire flickered tigerishly in his wide green eyes, intent on her, and on his tassels of hair, very like the fire. Until Hoelun said, “Your eyes belong to a stalking cat. You are my husband; you don’t have to stalk me.”

  He rose to his feet as if with fury, although far from furious. The night through they lay by the hearth in the firelight. He was nearly thirty and knew what he was about. After him he went on with deft fingers. “Do I disturb you?” Yes, but she hid rapture in his shoulder.

  About the cat’s eyes she asked. Bartan was tawny-headed like a lion and the whole clan had eyes in shades of slate, greys or greens. In answer he told her, as he had told her family, the Tale of Ulun Ghoa. It hadn’t been known in Olqunot.

  Our first father’s offspring hunted in the mountains where arise the three rivers Onon Gol, Tola Gol and Kherlen Gol. Most famous of the hunters was Borjigidai, from whose wife Monghol-Jin came our people’s name. With his wealth of pelts Borjigidai purchased horses for his son, Toroqol-Jin the Rich, and 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