first; an unsafe animal is dopey, incurious, slow. When plague comes to a ger the people of ger, the dead, the early-symptomed and the outwardly untouched, hang black felt over the door and shut themselves in, for the plague demon to do his worst with them, whom he has in his claws; to keep his rampage within the circle of their ger. Greater love hath no man, greater courage. Yesugei was moved every time he thought of that. Ordinary people. The plague demon – what sin created him? The shamans can tell you: a neglect here, a cruelty there. Can he ever be tamed? Of course; every demon is a victim too; once he was human, once animal, once like you and me. We make our own demons, we can unmake them. Only the circle is vicious, quipped a shaman. A circle is holy. The Tartar with the wife who drew a circle in the air and put his head into his hands. Yesugei poked at his armpits, his groin, where the black bulbs grow; no tumour, no tenderness; and he ought to be giddy.
The disease, the rot, his ex-captive had, whose cup he drank from? By rot he meant a slow disease and this was acute.
Have you sampled grain whiskey?
I can’t say I have. I can say your whiskey’s so awful I won’t know the difference.
The charm is in the effect. My accusation is foul magic: I do not choose to fight.
The other Tartar who drew a holy circle and bent his head into his hands.
Yesugei had got himself poisoned and Hoelun was going to be angry at him.
A hunt poison. Infrequently used – poison taints the meat – mostly to bag mountain sheep and goats for their horns. Wounds won’t stop the wild sheep and goats, they bounce off on three legs or with an arrow through a vital organ and you lose them in the terrain. It has to act fast, but that’s in the blood. Ingested, how does a poison behave? He had no idea, and besides he wasn’t an argali or a blue goat. Poisoned arrows are known in war, but again, he had drunk his.
He had thrown most of his up, hadn’t he? He felt his stomach empty. And Have-You-Sampled, how often has he tried to poison his own species, you have to ask? He’s a Tartar, but you know, he isn’t Persian. Versed in techniques to poison blue goats, but I’m a guess. Be a botched attempt, a headache and a gutache, not a lot worse than poison by alcohol.
There Yesugei stopped for an answer. The animals know. An animal crawls away to where he wants to spend his last or drop his bones, though to your eye there’s no need to despair. They’ve an ounce of prognosticator each and they know.
Ask a silly question.
I can kill Have-You-Sampled, I have that in me. I’d have felt more kindly towards the plague demon. What’s this one’s excuse?
If he’s fit to poison me, what isn’t he fit to do to Temujin? Yesugei staggered up and whistled for his horse.
Wait. Won’t he come after me, won’t he want to see his work? I’m not in terrific shape to defend Temujin right now. I mustn’t lead them to him. They don’t know he’s here.
Hoelun doesn’t know. If she doesn’t hear from us she’ll search in Olqunot and we haven’t been there. While she searches, the Tartars might hear his name mentioned, his ill-fated name: Dei Sechen of Bosqur, he’s engaged his daughter, he has young Temujin with him for a term-of-labour. Warn Ongirat? They aren’t fighters. Warn Hoelun? She is. I can go home and put this in her hands. Home’s six stages, at quick march. Twelve days turnabout. Safe to leave him twelve days, in camouflage? Safer than draw attention, try and take him with me? Can I guarantee I can get home? – if I start I’ll have to. Six days, I don’t know I have them up my sleeve. Wink can do the distance in three. “Can’t you, Wink?”
The horse, head thrust in a tussock, swivelled up to him his white-splotched eye.
With them after me to see the results, finish me off, I reckon I’ll get home? Yes, but that’s exactly when I don’t want Temujin with me. I have to move, one direction or the other.
Saints above, whoever’s there, point me in the right direction. Tangr, if you take an interest, if he’s part of your scheme, give me a direction. Wrong direction, the boy’s in my case. Your boy, Tangr, you tell me. Come on.
He watched the sky. A comet too much to ask? How about a bird?
A breeze blew on his face, a breeze blew north-west.
“That’ll do.” And he jumped onto his horse. “Home, Wink, fast as you can.” He had forgotten his seat, with food bags attached. “Weight,” he said dismissively and they left them behind. He knew he wouldn’t want the food. Bow on one hip, quiver the other, sword on his back: he was equipped, equipped to down a Tartar hunt party if he had to. “Whatever we have to do, Wink. If I have to kill you into the bargain, we run by sun and moon. Do you understand me?”
No doubt the horse understood his master was ill and urgent, that he had to be in his camp. In poetry the horses are talkative. Wink wasn’t, but Yesugei talked to him constantly. “Least I can do, aside from cling to your back.” He did cling, and sway; Wink understood the sways weren’t to steer him and ran a straight north-west across the drab Umber Steppe. Yesugei half-lay on his neck and crooned. “The ideal horse: his nostrils quiver as briskly as the gills of a fish; he has a hare’s haunches, a weasel’s spine, legs from the gazelle; the crest of his neck he arches like the peacock; his head a serpent’s head, dainty and neat and erect. That’s the ideal horse. Here’s only you and me. Get me home alive, Wink, you’re a legend.” In poetry the horses save their masters by sublime loyalty and fiendishly clever tricks. Wink stuck to running. A gallop exhausts a horse, a trot exhausts the rider; the run is a gait you can go at the day, and the night and the day and the night. Yesugei half-lay on his neck, face in his rough hair, an eye on the rear horizon for Tartars, until one night his sight shut up, shut him in a box with the lid not tightly on, with a slit. But they either didn’t catch him or didn’t try. It’s possible, he thought, the others have thrown a bag over the old loony’s head. Quite possible at that. Still, not to stake Temujin on.
Encouragement to his horse meant he didn’t have much time to cogitate or contemplate or any of that. He didn’t feel a need. He did hear the dead of Bor Nor, who said to him: Nine years, Yesugei, nine years and no more. You had an errand, but your errand is done and you’re nine years overdue.
Yes, he answered them, yes. An eddy of Bor Nor had caught him into its great tide, almost the moment his errand was done. Did they wait at the lake of Bor Nor, wait to see Tangr’s scheme? Dead Mongols don’t mind the water. He had an image of the ghosts in the wind-ruffles, or adrift on the wind with the herons and the storks; he thought of the crystal and marble in winter, the lake like a crystal chalice, a marble temple; he thought of dead comrades, and he didn’t mind the water either.
When he threatened to drift with the wind and slip into the water too soon, the voice came back again, the firm dry voice. Ride on, Yesugei. Ride on.
Now he didn’t argue with him. “Uge, I can’t do this without you. It’s for your namesake, Uge. Stick to me.”
Ride on, Yesugei. Ride on.
Camp was desolately quiet. Through his narrow slit of eyesight, like a stupid helmet, he saw no-one; no-one shouted to him as he jogged in slung about his horse’s neck. What had happened here? But when he reached his tent he heard his door guard Qongdaqor, reliably at station. “Yesugei? Yesugei, are you inj...” Qongdaqor’s face came into vision. “Dear God.”
“What’s happened here?” he demanded as Qongdaqor thrust a shoulder underneath him. His horse, at a stop, trembled violently. “Where are they?”
“It’s the Onon’s day. They’re at the river.”
“My wife, at the river?” That was, what, another hour? He’d never last.
“No, no, she didn’t go. She said she’d go later. She’s about.”
“Then get her for me, for God’s sake, Yegei.”
“I can’t...” Qongdaqor had him sprawled on his arm and shoulder. He bawled by his ear. “Hoelun, Hoelun, Hoelun.”
“I’m injured on the inside,” he told him. “I’m slain by poison.”
Qongdaqor dragged him over his threshold, and bawled. “Hoelun.
”
Going backwards with his heels bumping, Yesugei lifted a finger to his horse. “My hero.”
Where she prowled on Dolion Tor she heard, she heard and she knew who. She knew, Yesugei. He was so strange; he was flippant, he was flighty, he didn’t do as I told him; the spirits were upon him, shortly to take him. Clearly she thought this as she sped.
Outside the tent, his black with the splash of white over one eye lay on his side, with the life and effort in him to shiver. Nearly she stopped, for a horse in heart-arrest from exhaustion can be revived with kicks to the heart. But she went by.
Inside lay Yesugei, his face stiff, rough, a bark effigy of him, greenish as if his eyes had leaked. He didn’t see her, not a yard off, not until she knelt in front of him. “Hoelun,” he said with a voice very normal from the grotesque face. His hands groped.
She gathered both his hands in hers on his chest and asked Qongdaqor, “Is he sick?”
“He is poisoned.”
Yesugei said, “He has his wits about him, but no great hope, Hoelun. Who is here to entrust a mission to? There is not a moment to be lost.”
“In camp, us and Monglig. The whole of –”
“At the Onon. Fetch Monglig,” he told Qongdaqor.
“Use me, master. Give your orders to me.”
“You,” he snarled, “you don’t leave my wife’s door. Fetch Monglig.”
“He’s at the water