Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1)

light. Much of the secrecy is ritual; go back to sleep, they tell their husbands, you haven’t seen what I’m up to. But Hoelun, left out, slept on obliviously.

  Five hours into the day Goagchin asked her, “Aren’t you at Ghajaru Ineru? I know you didn’t attend the Onon...”

  Only then did Hoelun notice she was in a camp empty of its upper crust of women, with the odd slave left, like Goagchin. It was incendiary and she went up in a roar. She had been at home without her hat, and without her hat she followed their trail. A gregarious assembly of women on a gala day in their tallest and most ostentatious headgear isn’t hard to locate, ritual secrecy aside.

  In her daily wear Hoelun barged through them straight for Orboi Queen, with her sidekick queen and sister-wife Unegen. It was late in the festivities: they had sacrificed a cow, and on a frame erected the head, hide and hooves. Hoelun stalked up to Orboi where she sat under her saggy cow on stakes. “You have forgotten me, Lady Orboi.”

  “Oh,” she said as if she had. “Lady Hoelun.”

  “What do you mean, to eat the spirits’ leftovers without me? Am I foreign to your sacrifice? Am I to be ignored with the slaves?”

  Unhatted, Hoelun’s hair whipped her own face in the wind. In her fury she was spitting, and she spat on Orboi’s vestments. At least, they claimed she had. The two queens exchanged a silent comment on her. Almost certainly Orboi had meant a petty social exclusion: oh, you slipped my mind. But in the moment that was lame, and the logic led her; Hoelun’s own words led her. “Why,” she said airily, “Lady Hoelun, weren’t you wed into Merqot? Indeed, for your white bones, since you are here, join us in the feast. But I didn’t number you among those I was obliged to call.”

  This was outrageous. This was to deny her union with Yesugei, and him newly dead. “Over Yesugei’s sacred bones you have the effrontery?”

  “Over Ambaghai’s sacred bones, you have effrontery, lady. Ghajaru Ineru is in my purview and I think I know who to invite.”

  With this statement Orboi committed herself to an ostracism.

  Beside the queens, next in grandeur, sat Tamsag and Abaghai Ghoa, exquisite antiques, as aristocratic as lions and horned after wild rams, but utterly harmless. By their faces they were dimly startled by the scene. More modestly situated, she caught sight of Mamaj, with whom she got along. Mamaj dropped her eyes.

  Since she had given Daritai his answer, Daritai’s wives, that is, now, the women of the Kiyat camp, had chilled towards her. What did Daritai tell them? That she didn’t deign to do as Noikon’s widows had done? That he had been direly insulted? That she was too hoity-toity for him, for them?

  It was impossible, impossible to let another into the nightskins where Yesugei had been. It wasn’t for Yesugei’s sake, who might have expected her to revert to his otchigin in the normal manner. It was her. She could chew her leg off, like an animal in a trap, with less sense of self-infraction. But she didn’t scorn to, and she didn’t put herself above others who had lost their husbands.

  It may even be my old fears of unchastity, that once I had two husbands. Once I knew enjoyment of Tchiledu and that is true – very, very remote but true. I tore off my shift for him, lest I forget. After Yesugei, no. And Yesugei took no other, when he might have had twelve, the marshal, a hero and so popular. Do they think of that?

  So popular. And I am unpopular, aren’t I? Have I noticed before? Did he notice? I think he did. Yesugei, who in his private life did nothing but flout convention. It isn’t that.

  With a conspicuous lack of concern, Hoelun turned on her heel.

  Early next day, as she nursed Yesugei’s baby daughter, Qongdaqor told her from the door, “Tayichiut are striking tents.”

  To this news she said merely, “Orboi Queen and I like not to live a team in yoke.”

  For years they had, and Yesugei’s head shepherd Jaraqa must sort out the flocks: flocks that had intermingled, that had struck up friendships, as sheep firmly do, in fact flocks Yesugei first cut from his own to give Tayichiut a leg up, to help them from the forest onto the steppe. The sheep weren’t happy, and neither the shepherd. He came in to splutter to her. “That Orboi – I do not call her queen. It isn’t queenly, to my mind, to call you what she calls you.”

  “What does she call me, Jaraqa?”

  Jaraqa puffed and blew. “My mouth cannot cooperate.”

  “Why, dear, at my orders?”

  “A slattern–” his eyes roiled in their sockets – “with the sight. She says you tried to curse her. You muttered and spat on her garments.”

  “Mutter I have to reject. I was loud.”

  However, when Uder Unan and Baqaji stepped in to take their leave, her heart, alive to them, misgave her. They were distressed. Sufficiently to say, “Our chief can’t enforce our esteem or our affection. Only our obedience. It’s a sorry day.”

  From Yesugei’s friends, this half-convinced her to be sorry. On their exit she watched them stop by Temujin in the lane. Baqaji crouched to talk to him and Uder Unan stroked his neck with a thumb. Hoelun didn’t overhear what they said.

  Obstreperous animals, and the uproar of a removal no-one had known about yesterday – these weren’t Tarqutai’s fault. The abrupt split had been his mother’s idea. He thought he might disdain to be humiliated, and with his half-brother Todoyan, Unegen’s son, he rode on ahead out of the chaos of the flocks. As Unegen to Orboi was Todoyan to Tarqutai: those times Todoyan acted on his own initiative he was found erratic, perhaps through want of practice.

  When Yesugei’s shepherd in his state of exasperation dogged the Tayichiut brothers and told them what he thought of them, from a distance people saw Todoyan lift his spear in threat; saw Tarqutai attempt to ride on with his brother in tow and with his dignity intact; saw the shepherd, a slave, on foot, shake a finger at the spear and not cease his tirade; saw Todoyan lope at him on his horse. Saw Jaraqa dodge and swerve, saw the spear drive on a line with his spine.

  Temujin and Jochi saw, where they clapped together a wicker corral for the Kiyat sheep. They saw Jaraqa stretchered past them on a section of wicker borrowed from their fence, the spear out at his neck as if he had a double backbone.

  The flabbergasted children simply stood there, in human cries and chaos, now, not the sheep. In an odd consequence of Bor Nor they hadn’t been exposed to violent death. They hadn’t seen fighting men stretchered into camp to be nursed by their wives and children. In their ignorance they heard glamorous tales of violent death on a grand scale. They hovered on the spot in fascination, very like vultures. Then, like vultures, they inched forwards, Temujin and Jochi, the one an incitement to the other. They went to see. Temujin, two years up on Jochi, put on a spurt, into a trudge, faint, but his eye alight.

  There knelt Monglig with his father’s head in his lap. To Temujin’s disbelief his father was alive, alive with most of a spear in him. “It’s Temujin,” he quavered. “Can I help?” An errand, he thought. Fetch a surgeon. Fetch Hoelun. Fetch water.

  It wasn’t Monglig who answered. Jaraqa did, with a spear in him, croakily, from Monglig’s knees. “Is that you, Temujin? Alas that your saintly father sees us from his cloud. This is the end of Yesugei’s days and ways.”

  Jochi had come up behind him. When Temujin turned to run he ran smack into Jochi, but blundered around him and kept running.

  Temujin had vanished. “He hared off,” Jochi had to tell her. “Flipped his lid.”

  “Upset, Jochi, was he?”

  “Lost his bottle.”

  A week went by before he traipsed in on a mare beyond her milk years whose whereabouts were only thought of when they moved, no halter, a switch of larch for a whip. Neither damaged nor severely starved, but in danger of throttling from his mother. “After what had happened, to worry me like that? I didn’t know whether you were next. I didn’t know whether you had gone after them too and got short treatment. It can’t be put past them – Tarqutai who rode on as if his brother had left for dead a stoat that dared to yap at him.”

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry, mother. He is dead?”

  Hoelun had spent a wild week of anger, of anxiety. “No, he’s on his feet and with the sheep.”

  Temujin lowered his eyes.

  “How have you fed yourself?” she demanded. “Did you stone rabbits?”

  “I met people.”

  “And you just waltzed up to drink their milk for them? Never mind who they are. I met people. Your father met people. Your father learnt he gave his trust too easily. You had better learn.”

  No answer.

  “Where have you been?”

  “The Sacred Mountains.”

  “The –? And what for?”

  “I didn’t go in. It’s marshy and the streams are in torrent in the melt. You have to know the paths. But I saw them from the outside.”

  She flapped over him with a shriek. “What for?”

  The truant didn’t take this for a question. Contritely he glanced up at her, from Yesugei’s eyes.

  One morning Qongdaqor did a double-take to see Hoelun walk from the tent: she wore Yesugei’s spare cuirass, shiny with new oil, and a round helmet of hard leather in Tibetan red that had been a trophy on the wall. She asked for her steed and Ubashi.

  The underemployed camp captain did a double-take and then he did a triple. “Mistress, your instructions?”

  “Ride with me, Ubashi. We circuit Kiyat.” From its tripod stand she hoisted Yesugei’s tuq, a twelve-foot spear of ash with an iron ring for the tails