Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1) Read online

2. One People

  Joyously they lifted him on the white felt for a throne and danced a ring around the King Tree of Qorqonag, until they wore a furrow to their ribs, until they dug a trench up to their knees.

  The Secret History of the Mongols, passage 57

  It was the fat time of year: the waterside meadows that pitch of green that screams at the eye; the foals lusciously at suck, and pinched from their mother’s teats, ayrag galore – ayrag that buzzes on the tongue like a bee, caresses the throat like a kiss, floats in the belly like a wafted balloon – frothy and fizzy, tart and sweet, churned, fermented, a sort of yoghurt-beer. Ayrag for an inner glow and an outer burst of robust health, ayrag to keep you hale and hearty into old age.

  The old had come early. They had less to do, and possibly more pressure of thought in their heads. Together they sat, physiognomies familiar for a half a century, now with an element unknown – unknown, but in common. So Bartan saw and understood them. He had meant to enjoy his grandchildren, and a reminiscent natter; he had hung up his quiver with his trophies on the wall; he had aspired to slip off in his sleep, and not for years yet. Idylls of old age had been abandoned.

  On the principal question to be decided by the meet – choice of a khan – few of the old seemed to have a strong opinion. Bartan had none, but important to him was a nearby matter, on which he spoke wherever he sat with groups in discussion. Every time he gave his speech almost word-for-word, for he had boiled it, shaped it, hardened it and oiled it, like the leather armour on his back. And the grey-tailed gentlemen who listened were in harness. “When Khabul Khan like a grand old tree crashed to earth, we besought him tell us in whose hands he wished to leave his people. We said, you have seven sons, you have distinguished nephews and cousins; among these the khan has the ability to judge. Khabul answered, he inclined to entrust his people to Ambaghai, son of his cousin Bilga the General; him he judged most fit. Did not Ambaghai know (though in his hour we were not there, but only my brother Oikon to go with him to the grave) his is the voice we need to hear when we determine the most fit? He knew, and he contrived to smuggle a message to us. Yet this message of his is found to be equivocal. It was to be delivered to Cutula and to Attai, and he suggests his listener for khan. When you are khan, he says, to Cutula, and again to Attai.

  “Why does Ambaghai equivocate with us? When a judgement was called for, did he stay undecided? I never knew him to. No, he was not hard-put to give to us one name, he can weigh the claims of different men. He gave us two – and haunts us with the old ghost of factions. Factions, and Khabul Khan but ten years in his tomb? He is not scared of factions. The Mongol tribes are a people. It is what Khabul Khan stood for. And Ambaghai wishes us to use the muscles of our unity, and feel for ourselves how strong they are. That ghost he dares invoke, that we may see it laid, here, when we choose a khan in the Qorqonag Meadows.”

  His speech didn’t go unchallenged. A Jajirat with half a nose but a huge scar – a face that disarmed Bartan, that had earnt the right – said to him, “One of these names is your own brother, ba’atur. A brother has an interest, that’s scored into the bone. Two’s a party interest. Three’s a faction. Factions, yes; we here are old enough to remember, and beware.”

  “In that case Khabul’s sons can’t make up a faction, since Zhongdu. There aren’t three of us alive. I’ll be at the gates before impious hands take down those relics from their wooden donkey. From their hill of perverted cruelty I’ll fetch those relics home to Holy Old Haldun, our Sacrosanct Mountain. Or I’ll join their spirits at the hearths of our fathers, where there is virtue, where there is honour, where a man can be glad he has lived.”

  The Jajirat heard him with a faint light in the eye. “Gates of Zhongdu? You must be sixty. Hu-sha-hu was thirty years ago, and you weren’t wet behind the ears.”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “I’m sixty-six. I have my date fixed because my name’s Heavenly Hair, after the comet. I’ve hung on, with half my nose; and obviously to me now, I was sent, at the end of my career, to strike cosmic fear and awe into the Tartars.” His scar crawled to the side – clarified by his eyes as a smile. “I’ll see you there.”

  On the eighth and ninth of the moon the young converged on Qorqonag Meadows in thousands and tens of thousands. The weather of minds, the atmosphere, stayed clear and constant, didn’t change for mass of people or for giddy youth. No-one had come here to squabble, they came to pick a man to lead them into war. They had met in summer, to go to war in winter – not on Tartary first and China next, but in a double front on both. No-one questioned that. Least Bartan, who believed in the justice of the cause. Tangr determines wars.

  At ascent of the moon on the ninth, the actual start-time of the hur altai, the rival claimants rode in. They rode in side by side with their bands jointly, indiscriminately behind them. It captured the general mood, caught and flew the mood like a hawk to the sky. Along their way through the willow trees folk turned to see them and loosed shouts of sudden inspiration, shouts of one people, one people. One under God, for Khabul. Though beforehand there had been preferences, in that moment both were loved; the task of choice was felt to be a mean thing.

  Three winters away on China patrol hadn’t shrunk Bartan’s brother. Cutula spilt over his horse like a saggy ger without its trellis dumped on a two-wheel cart, like a bear blown up with autumn honey straddling a sheep. God made the Borjigin big, but Cutula must be the biggest they got. On sighting Bartan he roared with the face and the voice of a sunshiny storm. He had a battle-stunt whereby he hugged his foes to death; on this score Bartan fended off his arms, content with a clout between the shoulderblades.

  Attai Taiji and Cutula pitched next together on the bank of the Onon Gol, one of the three rivers that wind down from the Sacred Mountains and describe where the Mongols live: Tola curls on the west, Onon drives to the north, Kherlen slants easterly. These were the Mongols’ northernmost grounds, that belonged to Tayichiut, Ambaghai’s tribe, and Attai’s. Ambaghai had nominated one of his ten sons – not the first in fortune’s order. Fortune doesn’t send your sons to you in order of utility, to spare a father heartache; though his love be equal a man can and must judge the talents of his sons. Age has weight, age is experience; the aghaship goes on age, but not other office. Khabul, had he been of a selfish, clannish make, could have spoke his first son Oikon, or his second Bartan. Instead he set a tradition of the man most fit for the job. I am no khan, Bartan laughed, I am moody, I am nostalgic, if left be I can brood the day away. Cutula? Not at thirty, no, not against Ambaghai. But at forty he has a tighter organisation inside the head, and he has lost none of his gusto... the famous Borjigin gusto, which boils down to the fact, or rumour, he can eat a grown sheep at a sit and drink to make his father blink. The latter was quite true, the sheep three-quarters true, and regretted. Or else Attai Taiji (taiji, a Turk ornament to the name, in vogue). Young as he was he had made a splash in battle – a splash of Chinese, always most popular – and he cut a figure, he had romance. There he sat under his fantastic standard of a tiger’s tail wound about a copper pole, in a ruby satin hat, his forelock grown almost to his lip, to be tossed from his eyes like a stallion. Women and boys wouldn’t go past him, the vast majority of both enamoured of him. Cutula had homely features and grungy sheepskin and enamoured only his trusty wife Galut – but he had the size of a myth. Romance or myth? The physical was a factor, people like a leader to stand out. Bartan overheard: “I tell you what, with the choice between Cutula and Attai, to lift up on a white felt and dance with him – what do you reckon?”

  “Cutula, definitely. Like, you can’t turn down the challenge.”

  “Won’t be pretty.”

  He hoped they didn’t choose for sake of the challenge of Cutula and a rug... but they might. Borjigin, People of the Wildfowl, were get of Bodonjar, from whom a third of our tribes descend. If an arm of them threatened to become a kingly clan, to Ulun Ghoa’s prophecy, that was because they stood out. It wasn’t coincide
nce: most Borjigin were normal Mongol, by now, but Khabul had been a spectacular throwback and his after him. Widely through the world you see blow-in strangers adopted as kings, being different or being God’s gift. Who are we? Are we Rus, or are they too recent? Are we Scyth, or are they too remote? The Oosoon were pigmented like us, in the Huns’ day. We’re Mongols. Our friends Uriangqot are here, sloe-eyed and thin as splinters. Physical type doesn’t matter – that was Ulun Ghoa’s lesson too.

  For a few heady weeks of the year the steppe in a binge throws out a wilderness of flowers that tangle your hooves and confuse your horse. At dusk Bartan strolled in a meadow of anemones with Cutula and Galut.

  Jurchen China had invented a death for exclusive use upon steppe people: a hurdle in satire of a horse that they affixed you to by nails through the thighs, set up on a hill exposed to the weather, without garments, for on the steppe people are proud of how hardy they are to the elements. The hurdle has a donkey-head and tail from their theatres, and is called the wooden donkey. Blood loss and cold kills you within a few days. The corpses aren’t removed. This is done in a district of the city.