Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1)
troughs,” Hoelun threw after the guard.
Alone with her, he seemed to put aside impatience; his hands squeezed hers and he peered at her through pussy eyes.
“Who did this to you? Why?”
He lay and panted; a pant in the chest beneath their hands, in the tongue behind his bottom lip.
“Tell me who. Husband, I will avenge you.”
The bark-like skin of his face cracked, cracked into a smile. “Ah. There’s my Hoelun. Hoelun, after the conqueror of the Orqon. That isn’t terribly Ongirat.” He smiled on. He had his air again. “I’m afraid he didn’t give his name.”
“Yesugei.”
“Tartars, by their silver.” So easily he spoke from his harsh, stiff face. “But who or why? He was sick unto death himself, and old, a relic from the war, he must have thought to take a Mongol with him. At random.”
“Describe him. He has kin.”
“None of that. None of that, Hoelun, there’s no gain. Keep out of trouble, you and the children, that’s what I want from you. No Tartar feuds. No avengers hidden in vats of ayrag. No inquiry. Promise me, Hoelun. No inquiry.”
“How, how can I? How can I make no inquiry?”
“Have I not ridden home to you? You won’t grudge me now? Promise me, Hoelun.”
“Of course, of course I promise you, Yesugei.”
Again he smiled. “That’s the way, my love. Stay out of Tartary. The children need their mother. My wife, my love.”
“Mine,” she gasped and kissed his lips.
A pop-eyed Monglig stopped-and-started in, flung off his hat. Hoelun held out her hand to the twenty-year-old. “Come where he can see you. He is partly blind.”
To issue his instructions Yesugei pushed up onto his arms and shook confusion from his head. “I have left Temujin with his future wife’s father, Dei Sechen of the Bosqur-Ongirat, who is camped between Mount Frosty and Mount Flowery; we have agreement for a twelvemonth’s term-of-labour. Monglig, these are my orders. Bring Temujin home. Don’t talk to strangers. Between here and there don’t tell your names. Act as if in hostile territory. Act as if you’re out on espionage, lad. I won’t send the troops in, we’ll do this the quiet way. I’ve entire trust in you, Monglig. Follow what I have told you as if I’m holy writ. Lose no time.”
He was satisfied. Qongdaqor and Hoelun helped him lie down. Right away, plainly, he felt he didn’t have to struggle any more. Right away his eyes wandered, wandered where he didn’t see them, or look for them. They focused on other things, they fixed.
Qongdaqor bent to her ear. “Come away, lady.”
She spat at him, “Not yet.”
Monglig backed from the verge of death as from a cliff. The dead, too, have an instinct to cling, and in their fear of the strange can be a danger to their near and dear, they can try to take a familiar face with them. Not so Yesugei, with his eyes elsewhere; when Qongdaqor prised her hands from his, he didn’t cling. “Let him go, lady. Trouble not his spirit. His spirit is untroubled but for us. His heart is wrung to see you weep as he sets out on journey.” To Qongdaqor’s strong, kind murmur, in Qongdaqor’s strong, kind arms, she was walked from the tent.
The white eye of his horse stared up to heaven.
7. Hoelun Alone
No followers but our shadows, no store outside of our fat.
The Secret History of the Mongols
No-one said, humour him. No-one spoke in such fashion, but they went about to do his orders in the spirit. Qongdaqor growled, “’Taint a wonder,” which meant a man who had his milk poisoned might suffer from mistrust. Extraction of Temujin from Ongirat, therefore, was a quasi-military operation. As if you’re out on espionage, lad.
That Yesugei be poisoned struck his camp as one of the more grossly unfair of flagrant injustices, in the history of. “Never hurt a fly, unless the fly hurt him first.”
“Even then, he’d give it a chance to apologise.”
No investigation into his death – that was an elephant of an order to humour. But he had been lucid.
Monglig had nothing against a spot of espionage, and like most in the camp he had thought of Yesugei as the best person he knew. Anonymous travel, avoid strangers. You don’t have to see the whys and wherefores in holy writ.
By the time he got to Bosqur he was in the mode, and he took into his head to conceal Yesugei’s death. Out here, unknown, were his poisoners; why tell them the upshot of their piece of skulduggery? Why tell Dei Sechen, who was a stranger to Monglig? Err on the safe side – that went to Yesugei’s instructions. In war, in espionage, a fib isn’t a fib, and Monglig lied in Dei Sechen’s ger: he told them Yesugei’s eyes ached for Temujin.
Straightforward, if affable, Dei Sechen questioned, “Has his mother an objection to the match?”
“No. No, nothing on those lines. It is only the marshal’s desire to have him home.”
Monglig tried to say the marshal. At home they said, him we lament. It is decent not to name the newly dead. Behind decency lies the logic of self-protection, for the dead don’t at once want to be dead, and the path to the ghosts’ haven is difficult, fraught with hazards. The dead loiter and yearn for old acquaintance, whom they try to seduce or snatch. In cases of haunt, where they can’t or won’t find the way themselves, after a few months a shaman escorts them, goes the journey with them and delivers them into the arms of dead kith and kin. Yesugei doesn’t haunt, Hoelun had said straight away, Hoelun who was known to have the sight; he is gone, gone. Nevertheless Monglig felt awkward to name him.
You can’t always be too fastidious. On his excursion for battle-news at twelve, with the numbers of the dead, in the need to determine who’s dead and who’s alive, people hadn’t used a lot of circumlocution.
“Go home to your father, then, Temujin,” said the old Ongirat, “who is very fond of you. But vouch for us. You haven’t been unhappy here?”
“No, Father Dei,” Temujin answered heartily.
“Ask my friend to lend you back to us shortly. We are in a way to miss you too – are we not, Borte?”
The girl he was engaged to said to him, “Yes, come back as soon as you can, Temujin.”
Once they had left the ger Monglig found himself in another tangle-up, from his fib. It isn’t that your father misses you, he had to tell Temujin. It is that he is dead.
He thought the boy bombproof, since he didn’t cry. But Temujin, at the age he was, might have been told that God had gone out of the sky. He was more puzzled. This is near where there was the wolf he frightened away, he thought on the trip home. This is where he told me what the clouds are. This is where...
They saw a drastic change in Mengetu. He had had, now, two brothers foul-slain; and in neither case had he had his vengeance. To Hoelun he told his heart. “On the outside I am Mengetu; inside I am a mad dog. My late brother is very fine to forgo revenge for a random act. I won’t transgress his wishes; if I do I involve his children and my own; arbitration is tricky to organise in a Tartar feud. Though I am conscious of his reasons, I cannot stand his sentence. It is a sentence to me. I am sorry, Twig; you were the finest of we brothers, and Noikon right behind you; there was no justice for Noikon, and again, there is to be no justice. Any day, maybe tomorrow, a man is going to say to me I turn a blind eye to a brother’s murder. Last time I challenged to duel. Next time I rather fear I am to rip his liver out, tear his liver in my teeth before his ghostly eyes. It is impossible for me to live in society.”
Hoelun understood. “Although I find I do not crave to slaughter Tartars. That is because I’d have no satisfaction. If I slaughtered Tartary, still, he is gone. And hachi there is none of in the world.”
“Hoelun, I hope you forgive me,” he resumed. “But I cannot be a social beast.”
“Galut Queen, after her losses, lives in a deep privacy. I think of her. It is a temptation to me... to lick my wounds. To have done.”
“In need, seek me in Jangsiut. I don’t want to cast aside my duties altogether. I believe I can be of use in
Jangsiut. They are on poor grounds, and though I can’t help them to wealth of grass and water, I can stand up for them in argument with the hungry gangs once known as Mongol tribes. No doubt,” he laughed with difficulty, “I feel fit to hide my face amidst our slaves. Am I a free man? Not without my vengeance. I am in shackles.” And Mengetu moaned, “Had his death been self-inflicted. Had his end been one of ignominy underneath the axe, my hands had been thus tied, exactly thus.”
“Go with God, my husband’s agha,” she said.
Others, whom he didn’t talk to, criticized him as one of those antisocial animals who aren’t driven from a group but drive themselves away, cranky and embittered. The Tartar’s poison had poisoned him too, they said, and thought him derelict in duty. The fourth brother Daritai almost said as much. “He leaves me in the lurch a bit. That’s what an otchigin’s for – have the baggage dumped on him – only who’s in charge of Kiyat? I daren’t cross Mengetu, I daren’t accost him in a mood. Only number three had the tact for that.”
Next came the disbandment of his nokod. For this sad affair they gathered at a last banquet in the great tent with his stallions’ tails outside. It had been a month and they dropped the phrases, ours we have lost... mine, mine I have lost, said Hoelun. The phrases were for his sake, that he orient his spirit away from his old life; or for theirs, to be a boat of discipline on a sea of emotion.
In his honour the nokod attacked a