Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1) Read online

days’ journey on wheels. One day, from the black-crowned head of Holy Old Haldun, 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. 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.

  By Heavyweight Ulun Ghoa had two sons, Bol-Gunutei and Bel-Gunutei. 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 split from him and named themselves Dorben or the Four.

  One day Heavyweight rode into the Sacred Mountains to hunt deer. On Toqojagh Heights he met an 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 to the stranger 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 inquired what people they were from. “Ah, my people,” the stranger 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 slavery 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 my child to serve you. Only swear to treat him less harshly than the wolves.”

  Heavyweight answered, “Are these the tricks of Dorben now? We have a bargain, brother. 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 a servant for his tent.

  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 badgers’ 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. 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?”

  Hoelun said, “The mother who teaches a lesson with her arrows is warmed-over old story. But what is this about kings?”

  “Oh, imitated from the neighbours. Qatat have a story alike: a shut tent struck with white light, at the begetting of their kings.”

  “Imitated, after your grandfather Khabul became our first khan, I assume.”

  “Was he the first? First with the title, but his own great-grandfather Qaidu was as an early king, who began to forge the hundred tribes back into one people.”

  “Did our people need a second intervention by the holy? Had we gone so soon astray, from Tangr’s animals?”

  “What with the terrible behaviour of Dorben. The first of Mongols to split off into a tribe.”

  “In the tribe of Dorben they’d tell that tale differently.”

  “You’re right there. Qaidu and Khabul united our tribes, but I don’t know they’ve united our tales.”

  “You make Ulun Ghoa explicit on our descent from innocence, even as we came down from the mountains. It’s funny how we tell ourselves we have lost grace, but I think that is universal in our tales. To understand this strictly, your line has detached itself from our common Father Wolf and Mother Doe.”

  “Nobody understands these lineages strictly.”

  “Then you insert a redundancy of the divine.”

  “We had to explain our hair. To us – and yes, we are Khabul’s clan – the story suggests a restoration. 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.”

  “Of course, there is the other explanation. Those were simpler times, yet a woman may not admit she loves her slave.”

  “It’s in the telling,” said Yesugei.

  “Whoever he was, the stranger from the Happy Kings, I know he was a great big galumph. Maybe he was a giant. The giants live up north a way and likely they trade furs. Merqot call their big ones Giant – like Tchiledu...”

  “Now, are you fair to mention Tchiledu? Aren’t I taller than him?”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Do you come above my high hat?” She stood up against him to measure him. He pulled out the pins of her high hat and took her head into his hands. But Qongdaqor at the door interrupted with a guest and Hoelun was caught in chase of her hat.

  How enormously selfish was she, to tease Yesugei with mention of his rival? Her lack of sorrow for Tchiledu must come back to haunt her. There must be such a thing as nemesis, apart from mortal feud. But she was happy.

  Within days they upped tents. Bartan was in a fidget to be at the hur altai, the meet