fake shaman who cannot trance and gets drunk or smokes silly weed in a masquerade. Is your call to song genuine, Catchiun?”
Bubbly milk they did have, bubbly, without which they weren’t Mongol. “A Mongol is half ayrag, as a bow, for a fact, is half glue.” To Temujin Hoelun explained why she had traded their sheep and invested in mares. “Uriangqot, you notice, own no sheep but often keep horses. Aside from the milk I want to mount us into the future, and thirdly, we have a single treasure: that is Toghrul’s colt. I give him a herd, for the value of his foals.”
At twelve and ten Temujin and Jochi aspired to be hunters, not merely gatherers. High aim at the age, and to start with Hoelun didn’t encourage them, for amateur hunters were a serious intrusion on Uriangqot. Jochi’s knack for archery didn’t mean he downed wild animals at his whim. You have to find them and you have to stalk them, almost you have to talk to them, like Borjigidai the great hunter. And Jochi had the fault of being cavalier about their lives, which didn’t endear him to Agha Rich, giver of game. Otherwise as generous as the Uriangqot who taught them about him, Agha Rich, when he heard Jochi brag or hang his tongue out for blood (like the rude bits, an obsession) closed his heart and hand to them. Temujin explicated the problem to him; Jochi acknowledged he had a problem, and his answer was, “Can’t you see to the religious side of things, Temujin? I’ll shoot.”
“At least,” Temujin tried, “learn to walk quietly, or you’ll never shoot Chinese.”
“Why on earth not? Unless the Jurchen army slinks off to hide in the old Jurchen forests.”
Temujin had to admit his statement illogical.
“See, I’m made for Chinese, not for critters. I’ll be a Chinese shooter and a half. Walk quietly? Oh no. When I start on my march from the Onon they’ll hear the rumble of my footsteps and feel the earth of China quake.”
“That is, if you haven’t been unhappily reduced from lack of meat.”
Jochi bleared at him, for this touched his potential as a Borjigin giant. “I haven’t lost flesh. Tell me where I’ve lost flesh. My type don’t, you see, no matter what you do to us. Great-Uncle Cutula lost his frost-nibbled pieces, but he never lost flesh. As evidenced by the strokes the Tartars took. Hack a walrus with an axe. He didn’t feel the first six, and the next six got him cross.”
This was typical fare from Jochi. Often there wafted through Temujin’s mind thoughts he had to keep secret, such as, it’s Jochi who takes after Great-Uncle Cutula, and Great-Grandfather Khabul. Besides he’d love to be a battle-leader. Maybe mother did put me at the wrong teat.
Self-doubt struck too with Hoelun’s lessons; for instance, Mattyr the Hun. Tumen, chief-over-chiefs of the Huns, had a fine son in his teens named Mattyr, but Mattyr’s stepmother embittered his father against him for sake of her own infant son. Tumen sent Mattyr as his hostage to the Oosoon, and then attacked the Oosoon. About to pay the price of treaty-breach, Mattyr escaped on the Oosoons’ fastest horse; the Huns celebrated, although in his heart the father didn’t. Now he was obliged to name the hero his heir, and to grant him an army of his own, the Ten Thousand (tumens, we call our great regiments of ten thousand to this day). Mattyr took his Ten Thousand and trained them to obey him without question, without hesitation. On pain of death they must shoot at a target whereat he shot an arrow with a whistle. First Mattyr shot a whistler at the Oosoon horse that had saved his life. Several hesitated to shoot the horse; Mattyr gave the hesitators instant death. Next his whistler flew towards his most-loved wife. A few hesitated: Mattyr gave the hesitators instant death. In a third test he shot his whistler at his father’s war steed. None hesitated. After that, on a hunt, Mattyr shot his whistler at his father. Ten thousand arrows struck Tumen dead.
Though the punchline wasn’t new or unknown to the children, there were wows and gapes. They wondered how Tumen fit ten thousand arrows in him. When Hoelun went on to distil history from the legend, the youngest lost interest and she spoke to her upper-aged students.
History wasn’t less gruesome. In Tumen’s chieftaincy the First Emperor of China seized the Ordos, and did this while Tumen was away at war. In the Hun home camps the Chinese didn’t enslave, they slaughtered: orders were eradication. A huge labour force came on the heels of the army and threw up a wall across the Ordos; after the labourers came settlers. It is Tumen, then, who returned with his combatants to find the non-combatant Huns massacred and his territory walled off. What happened between Mattyr and his father happened after this; the soldiers Mattyr forged into a unit had had their wives and children slain in their absence. Whatever his actual methods, the legend stresses he was harsh. A father seeks to have his son killed, a son kills his father. What else, what similar, that isn’t in the tale, that the tale indicates?
When he was head of the Huns, Mattyr trapped the emperor in person out on campaign; at his mercy, which he was short on, the emperor agreed to Mattyr’s terms of treaty. The lesson in the legend? The fearsome, famous Huns, beforehand, were neither. Otherwise China might have thought twice about both its strategy and tactics. It is this near-fatal disaster that made the Huns the Huns we know: the people China had to treat with on equal terms – that is, the emperor had to address the head of the Huns as his equal. Do you have an idea how that not simply affronts but overturns China’s conceptions of itself and other peoples? China is Civilization. The humble-cake, and the cost, too, of the treaties, in the end drove them to launch an enormous war effort, decades of sweeps of the steppe, sweeps as far north as we are right now – once they reached the Sea of Origins – to hit them where they live, to finish the Huns, to finish with centuries of diplomacy and violations of space and skirmish. And they did have victories. But the exhaustion and expense brought the House of Han to the brink of ruin. Neither side can be said to have won that war.
“Their very first blow, occupation of the Ordos, was thought to be a fatal one and trouble-free. But the Huns were galvanised. Like the dread zombie, the corpse arose from the grave and clouted China. A thousand years ago. The lesson is forever. A people can suffer terribly, and yet draw strength.”
That was history. Hoelun had a third stratum to teach, about ways of life, and Temujin persevered though Jochi dropped off. “The First Emperor united China, and in opposition to him Mattyr assembled the first steppe-wide state. China has a self-definition of Civilization, as against outer primitivism. In a thimble, a Chinese observes ritual, where a non-Chinese behaves spontaneously, rawly. To quote disciples of Confucius, ritual diminishes feeling, and to follow one’s feelings is savagery. But we also have defined ourselves as Not China, and done so since way back before Mattyr. Under Mattyr we became a political unit. But we had been a unity in our way of life, and only that fact explains how one man from the Ordos pieced the steppe together like a jigsaw. When China started to form, to formulate its ideas – way, way back before the First Emperor – those who didn’t want to be a part left hamlets and villages and took to the alternative, the nomad life. It wasn’t about breed. People of a breed, of a bone split down the line of their affiliations. Hamlets and villages came under control of the governments and the ethic that were early China. The nomads walked away. We are the walkers-away. You might call us the Anti-Confucians. Quite consciously the early nomads were Not China: they wore badges, none of them went without a badge and the keen hung them by the dozen, nomads’ badges that are identical from end to end of the steppe, animal ornament, what else, symbol of our liberty, for on the hoof we were free. The Great-Antlered Stag, who always lies his antlers along his back, acrouch with his face up to the sky: he is here, he is on the Black Sea. Mattyr only had to send out a slogan, We of the Great-Antlered Stag, for them to understand him. Wherever people live in villages and towns China as a culture, and very often as a state, soaks them up. Only the nomads have been constant, constant over thousands of years, in rejection. In lean times, in fat times, Not China. Not us.”
Here was much material for Temujin to chew on. But to try to be a Mattyr?
The Ur
iangqot dwelt in triangular stick frames wrapped with hides – to the eye both rickety and draughty; but warmly snuggled in moss and deer skins, you can gaze cosily at the whirl of a blizzard through the tent. Deer skin is a great insulator, and damp-proof, even as a ground sheet. Their fundamental stock was elk, that browsed with heads submerged in the summer marshes, and like camels chomped the bark from trees. They got about on their elk, and Hoelun’s children loved to have rides; they felt they were inside a fairy tale, to sit astride an animal with antlers.
In his twelfth year Temujin saw Jamuqa again.
The mares weren’t elk, to feed underwater on bog greenery in spring; when meltwater with nowhere to go lay in the dales, mares had to exit the mountains to where the ground thawed and the melt meant streams and meadows. Uriangqot sent a member of camp out with their horses for the weeks of flood, and for this purpose Hoelun detached Catchiun. He had the dogs with him, Yesugei’s Rascal and Tiger the Second, and he had the severest caution on the subject of mushrooms. When Jamuqa and his escort, a knight in bronze armour (scale cuirass, arm-guards, helmet) rode from the west