Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1)
is Tangr venting his energies, thunder his shout; to mortals half-fear, half-invigoration, blasts of a power and a beauty from beyond, with side-effects of screams and stampedes of wild and tame, shortlived violent firestorms in the larches, which left singed or suffocated victims for the pot. In most instances he just feels too big for his own sky, like when you feel too big for your skin. Intrusions of God: they terrorize, but you want to join in, too, seize the instant’s hook-up, even if you get singed. “I almost believe in God when I watch lightning,” said Jamuqa, a remark that Temujin had to work his way through. He hadn’t met the possibility of disbelief in God... who was being extra visible right now. To Temujin, Jamuqa felt God, and that was more important than what he thought he thought. He didn’t irritate him with this interpretation. The glory of the lightning staggered them alike, that was the point.
North and south slopes were opposites, inversions, like Irle Khan where day is night and night is day and left is right. On one hill the sunny side was populated by elegant spruces, as straight and stiff-leafed and neat as a quiver of towery arrows, but over on the wind’s side the spruces grew in a dwarved version, and near the crest they crawled up along the ground in tormented clumps at waist-height. Elsewhere was a hardy fir that stood bolt upright in the battery; however, the trunk had branches only on one side, stretched out due south, while its weather front was bald and scabby. The tuq tree, Temujin called this fir, like a blown standard.
Temujin took Jamuqa to his mountain. It was a trip over intriguingly different ground, with features he hadn’t gotten to the bottom of. They started a strenuous day in the glen of the Kherlen and for three hours went up by deer paths that pushed a tunnel through the bush. From one stifled trail you came out on an airy shelf on the mountainside, a sort of insects’ city, mounds in symmetry smothered by a gorgeous green-themed silk of mosses. Above insects’ city, on much steeper ascents, growth thinned and the trees became slowly misshapen, stunted by altitude, by the perpetual winter underground and by the wind. Roots stuck up, too, to live half-exposed, as if the trees’ toes didn’t fit in their nightskins. An hour upwards was another flat space, a gallery over the curves of dark fir forest and the glint of streams in serpent shapes. Here were the stone toadstools. He had no other name for them, and no idea what they were: patches of stones that boiled out of the earth, in splotchy circumferences, of different width, but the stones in each patch similar and roughly even-sized, like toadstools with spots, a big toadstool next to a half-grown. They petered out into a zone of jagged red rock.
Now they were up among the shoulders of the mountains, burly brown shoulders worn smooth by age. The Sacred Mountains aren’t tall and sharp and spectacular – newer ones are that. Jamuqa and he scrambled up heaps of shale which trickled away underneath them. The wind was thin and whippy, the air thin and raw and without odour. Between the loads of shale you saw that the rock had cracked or split quite apart in crystal-perfect sequences. Crusts of lichen tinted an otherwise grey stonescape, rust and amber and off-white. Ahead was a blunt boulder and only sky beyond. Over this last height, the wind stiff in their faces but a remote whistle in their ears, they were on top of the mountain.
The mountain has no name. That has been forgotten, like an idolised king’s, and only its title left: Holy Old Haldun, haldun an obsolete word for mountain. In address you say Great-Great Grandfather, what you call spirits. It is vastly old and has the feel of a cathedral. On its lichened stone head scores of cairns have been built out of the shards that lay about, little stacks augmented by metal, barbs, a jointed bit, rows of overlapped leaves from armour. Temujin and Jamuqa were quiet up on the vaults, where the altar is in mountains. And afterwards: Temujin didn’t try to talk about the sense he had there, and likewise Jamuqa. Whatever Jamuqa thought he thought, he felt he was on hallowed ground and behaved by what he felt. There are the lesser churches and there are the great cathedrals of the earth; the great cathedrals can be worn smooth with age and yet you feel them. The back of Jamuqa’s neck prickled to tell him where he was. That, and he didn’t want to irritate Temujin, either.
At eight they had sworn their oath in Jamuqa’s lightning tree. They swore twice-over on Temujin’s mountain, and drank each other’s blood with water from the spring of the Onon. They built a cairn and stowed within the knucklebones they had exchanged as children, to lie together, to draw them always together again though the world throw them apart.
Uriangqot gathered yearly for a festival where the scarp of White Heights butted onto Spirits’ Peak. In the crack between were caves of ice, that melted very late and little, but when they did, the thaw in the caves gave off thunderous claps and eery squeals and shrieks, known as the Ice Voices. Passages to the underground such as these caves were paths to the world of the dead, the kingdom of Irle Khan. To congregate at the mouth of a tunnel to the ghosts was the sort of thing only Uriangqot do. Hoelun took her children, on the guarantee of the known efficacy of their shamans. There were more shamans than you could shake a stick at. Uriangqot felt free to laugh at her fears; they were great ones for laughter, and at you just as often as at themselves.
In their isolation this was the social event of the year. For the children, cut adrift from clan and tribe, ignorant of tribal society, who saw not a quarter what they ought of rites and rituals, she thought the get-together vital. For her the Ice Voices meant contact: here she met Gombo’s nephew Iladur, whose mother was Uriangqot, and heard the news. In developments this year, Tarqutai had weighted his name with an epithet, Kiril-Tuq, and one for Todoyan, Girte. Unfortunately no-one in Iladur’s neighbourhood knew what they meant. “Turk antiquities, I believe. What’s an epithet when people don’t know what they say about you?”
“An exercise in mystique,” she answered.
“Last year introduced us to the Tayichiut Princes, lineal and lateral to Ambaghai. Prince Tarqutai Kiril-Tuq is his unabridged title. It’s in-house only, of course, so far – the princes. The rest of us make a saint of Ambaghai; they try to make, what, an ancient-style Turk king?”
“They are sillier yearly. But Qongdaqor, Ubashi, Monglig: what news of them?”
“They send their love, and in token for the children...”
They always sent tokens for the children, a bone flute, a straw lion, a hood with furry ears.
The way to the reverse-world of the dead is known as the night road; voyages thither are overnight events. From dusk to dawn at the festival there was a choice between the drama of the shamans at the caves’ mouth or the theatre of singers, out of earshot. Hoelun didn’t give hers a choice. Never mind the netherworld, Catchiun was in the seventh heaven, for this year a singer of Turk epic had come and in five night sessions, with his harp on his lap for flourishes and mood music and for join-in choruses, sang Joloi. Jochi liked the eponymous hero, a lazy slob, a glutton and a dim-wit drunk, although he flattened whole battalions when he fought. Hoelun liked his two wives who had to drag him up to fight, sisterly wives, one a fund of wisdom and the other a mistress of the sword, who held the story together. Temujin liked his son Bolot, exiled underground, who fought a mirror-battle there with monstrous spirits while Joloi fought a war with his human enemies above; over Bolot’s head fought the shaman girl Black Shash in the likeness of a hawk. Five nights was a short epic by Turk standards; one was rumoured to need six months.
Jamuqa took to the Uriangqot song-type known as quests. These were set in a mythic world of ayyy and abassy: the ayyy a spirit-creature of the light, like elves, the abassy monster-demons from the deep. Humans didn’t exist, then, or there. Perhaps he liked them because brains definitely won the day, not brawn, and size didn’t count for much (nor species – animals got their chance to save the day). More often than not the hero was an orphan. Along with orphans there was a strange spotlight on childlessness, on figures who had given up a normal life for occult knowledge. Childlessness is the saddest fate. The cosmic scheme was odd: there were nine spirits of the stratosphere whose amusement was to gamble amongst themse
lves on earthly events, a pastime that caused much grief beneath and triggered much plot. Riddle contests were on a cosmic scale, an ayyy against one of the nine or a dark genius against a light, and on cosmic subjects. Transport was magical, as was transformation; steeds flew, and talked of course, creatures changed shape. But just as a shaman tells of the weird universe he travels through with an easy-to-understand drama of emotion, so in the fabulous story was a strong moral line, told in bold strokes. Fealty to oath though the earth burn up, loyalty beyond death. Frequently the search, the quest, was to find the Water of Life for a loved one.
Ayyy and abassy were at permanent war. Perhaps the ogres and the goblins stood for Jamuqa’s grandmothers. Tell the flogged child that goblins don’t exist. Yet in this stark dark and light, a person can cross over to the other side. An angel is tempted into the wicked legions; they pickaxe the ice off a demon’s heart and he joins the angel-knights. These folk tales of the Uriangqot, of a high artistic finish, sung in a simple melody and a soft growl, were fantastic, they were black-and-white, and you