whole-stewed ewe from the outside in; they peeled and split up the tail, the richest nourishment to be had, as thick as a fist with fat. After this rare gluttony of mutton (neither weather-kill nor a carcass gouged by wolves’ teeth) they sat over the goblets they had earnt in his service. One by one, not in turn but on nerve, they gave the tributes they had prepared, verses original or on crutches of the known and dear: his feats, episodes that caught his character, sketches of him in metaphor. Hagahar’s was a humorous portrait and a sore trial of grown men who wept with laughter. Bouts of black milk in between oiled eloquence. Among them his widow recycled a verse, that had once fit another hero, and fit him.
Of captains, of comrades, seen in the world,
His was the sweetest, the tenderest heart,
Truest to his loyalties, thirstiest for glory.
“Glory is love,” she concluded. “Love he had.”
Again the black milk said a deep amen.
After the elegies she asked them about their future. “Nokod leaders like him aren’t three-for-a-goat. Have you thoughts to attach to another?”
Hoelun was in an early stage of grief, and perhaps didn’t by intention load her question. The answer, anyway, went to the tune of her internal, No. Who else can there be?
“I don’t know there are any, lady, in the true old style.”
“No, he was the last of the true old style. It’d be a step down.”
“Steep, if we signed up with Tarqutai.”
“Tarqutai?” she queried.
“The chief of Tayichiut has put in an offer to take us over.”
Hoelun shed a haughty air. “An offer to take you over?”
“That’s about how we felt, lady,” glimmered Tailgan. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“A nokod ain’t a hand-me-down. Me, I told him what a nokod is: we choose our man, a worthy man. Through our tradition the worthy are strong on the steppe.”
“Worthy’s the old word, and not one – beg your pardon – springs to mind of Tarqutai.”
Brusquely from Garyp, “In spite of his exorbitant promise of pay.”
“Where was he to get that sort of a treasury, then?”
“Wasn’t curious. Purse for a mercenary guard.”
“Disbandment is a sad time for any dead man’s companions, to shake hands and take leave. In the songs they never do disband, but your captain isn’t anonymously poisoned in the songs, you have your last stand. We prefer to stand under his tuq and see our last of each other – we prefer disbandment to abandonment of what we are.”
Two or three months on, Hoelun sorely wished she had suggested the nokod stay together, pick a leader from amongst them, although he be not Yesugei. At the time, what was his, without him, she saw no purpose for, in despair she threw away; whereas in a later grip of grief she clutched at what was left of him and thought she had been perverse.
“We’re back to our tribes, most of us, lady,” Hagahar told her. “Lend a hand. Things are grim enough in mine. We won’t lose contact, I hope, a few of us been with Yesugei since he was a pup. Me, first glimpse and I was his; and the glimpse was him getting a tumble in a horse race. That’s true love. It was the way he whistled to his rival going past.”
Hoelun thought to equal this. “I loved him in an hour. But he had kidnapped me. It was the way... the way he was.”
Through the night they reminisced. “Not in vain did he live,” said Hoelun.
“No-one who knew him,” they said, “knew him in vain.” Very late, very drunk, about his tuq, they cheered him as they often had alive, in a throaty roar: hur ah, hur ah, hur ah.
It’s a Mongol cheer, that Europe learnt from Mongol armies at battles sixty years ahead, when the chivalry of Hungary and Germany found themselves outfought, out-thought and thoroughly out of their league in the scientific warfare of the foe. A big step, in sixty years, from hard times on the Onon Gol to triumphs on the Danube: Liegnitz, Wiener Neustadt might have been the moon to Yesugei’s nokod, the moon Dei Sechen dreamt of.
An otchigin is the family dumpster: as the ranks of his brothers thin, on him devolves the care and maintenance of the widows and the children. While they live they leave him free-and-easy, for his life grows hectic later on, escalates with death of brothers. Survival of the youngest is as guaranteed as might be, as he isn’t sent to fight. Daritai had also his father’s relics, his Aunt Tamsag and Abaghai Ghoa, both with slightly scattered knucklebones at the age they were, and he had the family’s domestics, with kids. There were kids in droves, in his custody. He had more kids than sheep. And Mengetu had walked out on him.
“That’s scarcely fair to say.” He had said so in the tent of Mamaj, one of Noikon’s widows. “You four brothers did things differently, to camp together. It’s usual for the otchigin to be the only man about the camp. Don’t we spoil you adequately?”
An otchigin has his brothers’ widows on temporary loan, in this life; he holds them in trust for the original, in the next life. A woman has only one husband, women say. Noikon’s widows did spoil him, half like a child instead of a husband, although a big child kept happy not by indulgence in honeycomb. And they told him off for greedy. What’s an otchigin to do? He has no fame, as he isn’t sent to fight. The other brothers claim to envy him and he claims to envy them.
Perhaps an otchigin observes his brothers’ wives and has the thought, one day. That’s only natural. Only natural, after a widow’s first grief, when she sees that life goes on, to start to anticipate the transfer. Mamaj, as a matter of fact, spoilt him in ways she attributed to Uriangqot, who had a name to be liberal. He began to imagine Hoelun at him like a lamb at the udder.
One day, just as they passed in camp, he said to her in a gentle joke, “Unless you do me the honour, Hoelun, I’ll be the butt of ridicule.”
From her face the thought had never crossed her mind. From her face, for an instant, now that the thought did, the thought was met with revulsion, disgust, contempt. As if an insect had crawled into her dead husband’s things, a slug in his nightskins perhaps, a spider in his boot.
Her answer was perfectly courteous. “My husband’s otchigin, I had given no thought to the question. Can I ask for an interval? I am inclined, at this stage, to live his widow.”
Daritai shrugged a crick out of his shoulder, and struck back with the jocular sarcasm that was his scratch or daub on hoof or horn, his mark. “It’s me who’s the butt; of course you haven’t thought. I’m afraid I’m your option, within the family, Mengetu absent and fed up with life. Oh, or there’s Bagtor. Quite a rivalry of charms.”
Hoelun, for an interminable moment, met his eye. She walked on.
Who’s in charge of Kiyat? – Daritai had asked. Crudely, that was up for grabs, or so Tarqutai thought. After he had failed to ingratiate himself with Yesugei’s nokod he tried again with Kiyat, and volunteered that year to collect from Kiyat for the tribute.
Tarqutai had alienated his own tribe of Tayichiut over tribute issues, over his inequity, and that was why the Tayichiut clan were here. Very briefly Daritai said to her, “Let him. I’m busy.” He and she only spoke briefly, since.
Ideal would be Mengetu. Short of ideal... take charge of the tribute herself? To voice objection to Tarqutai was to hang a rotten carcass on the racks. Orboi Queen, his mother, had years ago distinguished Hoelun as an enemy, which wasn’t inaccurate.
Yesugei had been aware of the frictions. He may have been naive, he may even have met his end naively, to drink a Tartar’s poison. Unperceptive he wasn’t, and he sized up Tarqutai and his mother the queen, but Yesugei had a knack and he managed to guide his fellow chief with subtlety, without antagonism, without getting hackles up. He used to say, “It’s Ambaghai’s widow, Ambaghai’s son. We owe him the effort.”
“He isn’t a much of a chip off.”
“No, he isn’t. But you never know, Ambaghai might be due a grandchild from his loins who is.”
“When Orboi Queen is out of the arena the grandchildren stand a chance. It is
a shame they cannot live up to him.”
“What, greatest Mongol ever?”
“I thought that was your grandfather.”
“It’s a toss-up. Temujin Uge told me Ambaghai.”
“Temujin Uge? He’s a judge.”
Hoelun settled for insistence on use of Yesugei’s figures from last year, which had been calculated with great headaches as to who can afford what, and Hoelun, do you mind if we throw in the speckled cow? Last year Yesugei had come home rich from Hirai, and he remained rich for upwards of a week. And that was why the tribe of Kiyat, as the Hirai khan had said, kept its integrity. Integrity as in unity, integrity as in behaviour.
To pick a quarrel, to air the putrefaction of the carcass, to have Orboi and Tarqutai up stakes and go and camp elsewhere, was a thing she half-wished for, although against Yesugei’s schedule; until she did exactly that.
Ghajaru Ineru is a rite for women wed into the tribe, who had thereby switched their spirit-loyalties; men, to whom a change of tribe is nonsensical or worse, stay out, as afraid of their wives’ alien spirits. Kiyat and Tayichiut held the rite jointly, close bones in the great skeleton, only separated with Ambaghai’s grandfather. Orboi, who reigned over the women, determined on an auspicious day, the date of which she kept under her elaborate hat, until she stealthily woke the celebrants from their sleep and a cavalcade of ujins in ornament, with whispers and stifled laughter, tiptoed from camp before