He was quite mad.
Bagtor lived with a sense of no-escape. His mind had closed him in, had stiffened into its cramped posture, a cower with an arm up in defence; he lost elasticity, as if he had grown old before his time, the way Temujin’s forelock is said to have gone grey overnight in his most desperate hour at Baljuna Lake. Time had a nightmarish go-slow for him, or go-nowhere. He’d always be a bully. He’d only have grown worse. And he knew. His love for Hoelun was like that too, no escape; at bottom he felt his love to be at one with the syndrome.
Can I start again, can I have another go? He might almost have asked. The Secret History tells that at the end he sat down with his legs crossed and waited to be shot. Temujin didn’t understand this element of acquiescence, which he interpreted as a moment’s dignity. It didn’t stop him.
Temujin watched him dance a jig about being a thief, with feelings he couldn’t have explained, at the time, and that later he lost contact with himself, that certainly seemed to him overblown. So he never had a proper explanation. It’s easy and must be true to say he saw his own horror, he saw his nightmares, he saw his monsters. It had to do with his absent father. It had to do with absence – of principles, of God – concepts that went with his father. He saw a void and reeled in horror.
To terminate this scene Bagtor jigged up and spat, with a huff and a puff, malignantly, into Temujin’s face, from a distance of inches, “Thief.” After that he jigged away with the fish on his shoulder. Where the river bank steepened into a little cliff he lifted the fish over his head, turned towards them to see that he had their attention, and hurled. They heard the splash.
Often Belgutei felt he had to look after his big brother. Now he tried to excuse him, and even stigmatized him. “Temujin, he isn’t quite... he doesn’t have his quota. He’s an arrow short of a quiver. I don’t mean he’s dumb. He isn’t dumb.”
“I know what’s wrong with him: he has no principles whatsoever. We don’t throw away food. We do not throw away a week’s fish stew.”
“I’ll get the fish.”
“Belgutei –” Temujin was frantic, and they had never seen him frantic. “Blast the fish.” That was loose interjection, for Temujin.
“Belgers,” observed Jochi, who hadn’t been in the thick, for once, “I know he’s a sweetheart with you, and you’re true-blue to him. But he’s way out of line.”
Miserably Belgutei said, “I’m going to get the fish anyway.”
Belgutei went to get the fish. Ever afterwards he castigated himself for this as a sort of dodge. Because the fish was belly-up, out of his depth, and he set about the task in a disheartened fashion, without haste to return to the brotherly fray, and he wasn’t seen again until late afternoon, which was too late.
“How can four grown boys be so useless? How can you be less and less use the more you grow? I’ll tell you how. You aren’t out to find food. You are out to score points. You are out to prove your masculinity or your righteousness. I am not the slightest bit interested in either. If you can’t hunt you will fish. If you can’t fish you will pull up onions.”
But to teenage Temujin, this was crudely, crassly short-sighted. The mother only thought about their physical selves. There was a huge war going on she couldn’t see – like those invisible fights in the spirit, Bolot against the monsters. Temujin felt beset, like him; like him he felt his battle important. She didn’t see.
“Over a bird?” Hoelun begged for sense, for perspective. “Over a fish?”
It’s about the foundations of the earth, the existence of God. And Bagtor’s masculinity mattered infinitely more than food to him. They were hungry. Bagtor and Temujin, to judge by external indicators, by brittle nails and holes between the ribs, the hungriest: Bagtor because he had a man’s needs, Temujin because he put himself last and fasted like three Christians after he ate with Uriangqot. Both would have agreed to starve for days, without a pang, to spite each other or trump each other. Murders are rarely done over birds.
Jochi banged the door behind them (remembers the Secret History) which was rude.
“We don’t hate a wolf who attacks the flock,” Temujin expounded in a slow, clotted voice, with slow, turgid hand gestures. “But a dog that turns on his own, untrustworthy, him we hate as if he were a traitor, a false-swearer. That’s what he is and we detest him and we do not suffer him to live. Him,” he went on with a heavy stress to indicate he meant Bagtor now, “whom we have had at our hearth, is that faithless dog, and I,” with an index finger up, “do not suffer him.”
Temujin was as weird as a werewolf with his fur out. His face, his eyes were hazy, fulgent, a blackly stifled sky with holes where a strange light swam. Yet none of this was altogether strange to Jochi: changes, changes in the aspect of men bent on manslaughter... the freaky stuff from the poetry wasn’t inaccurate, then.
The poetry didn’t go on and teach him that a man in this state ought to be stopped. It taught him that Temujin’s affairs were Temujin’s.
There’s a hungry contingent. There’s a pilferer of food. Jochi told himself the story. And the officer refuses, but the sergeant and the corporal know what needs to be done. “Kill him?” he ascertained.
The teeth grimaced as at salt water. “She –” and this meant their mother – “won’t so much as tell him off and never has.”
“Yep. It’s us to blame as usual.”
“It’s up to us, then. – To me.” Temujin’s hand went to his bow. Its flat case comes less than halfway up the bow, which slides in string-down – the steppe bow doesn’t have to be unstrung. The upper limb slants forward at your waist, just right to lean your hand on; you can pluck the string at your thigh, like a harp. Harps copy the shape, lap harps, the curly shape of Cupid’s bow, that came to him courtesy of the Scyths.
If Hoelun turned him out of doors he’d go to Jamuqa. Had Jamuqa baptised his sword yet? Temujin felt sublimely calm, he felt he lay in a boat on smooth waters. An odd image, as Mongols aren’t keen on boats. He smiled through a brief fiction: on Jamuqa’s doorstep after his manslaughter; Jamuqa told him he was a total idiot; he agreed. There are times you want to be an idiot, he said, no matter what.
Twice over, then, a part of his brain blew the trumpet of alarm.
So slowed down was he that only now Jochi answered. “Tem? That’s an us.”
“Not this time, Jochi.”
“Eh, Tem. It’s been us forever. What, ditch me, as soon as things get serious?”
“This is serious, this is manslaughter. I can’t involve you at twelve.”
“Neither of us are legal. Who waits until they’re legal? No-one famous. How about Tahamtam at thirteen? I’m a Tahamtam, at least a Tahamtam. Do you doubt me?”
“No, I don’t doubt you.”
“I shoot five years above my age, like Kid Karataz.”
“That happens to be an understatement.” Dimly he was bothered to hear Jochi thirst innocently for bloodshed. But he had the scent of blood in his nostrils himself, new to him and not what he imagined. They had only grown more ignorant, safely away from bloodshed in the Sacred Mountains. “These are my terms: come with me, but you must swear by what’s most holy to you, the fatal shot is mine.”
“He’s yours, Temujin, I know he’s yours.”
In a limbo, thought suspended, he found an unknown freedom; a limbo where he didn’t think or feel – he experienced, through senses vivid and slow. Thought seemed a buzz in the head and a dizzy veer from the past to the future; he was in the moment, the limbo, until he had his goal. So this is the clarity they describe, the concentration?
Temujin didn’t talk much while they backtracked to where they had caught the fish – heard and ignored Belgutei – took up the trail, the scuff of Bagtor’s boots. But he wasn’t oblivious to Jochi, to Jochi’s youth, and he bolstered him with a hand, with a smile, a smile from that sublime calm of his.
People were their own constables, their own detective sergeants. This put an onus on them to behave as such. They weren’t vigila
ntes. They were licensed to kill, but if you kill on suspicion or to prevent a crime that hasn’t been committed yet, you’ll have trouble in court. He was on my grounds to nab my sheep, I know he was, makes a shaky case. Cases go to court, after the arrest, which you do yourself. People didn’t lie, and that helped. Tribal justice, whether in Scandinavia or on the steppe, had the inviolable oath to depend on; your statement, with character witnesses, proved a case. On the steppe, when a touchstone of truth was called for, people swore, instead of a holy book, on gold. Gold is incorruptible, therein eternal, hence akin to the truth. Further, gold was a cosmic standard and stood for the sun, as if you swore on Tangr’s tuq. Gold has always been a barbarian splendour, whether in Scandinavia or on the steppe – civilized nations found gold crude; China did, and their love and worship was for jade. On the steppe, gold, the sun, fire, kingship had been a symbol-chain from Scyths through Huns to Turks and onwards, onwards to Temujin who by a quirk, suggestively, wore majesty in his hair.
It is only fair to Temujin to be explicit on one point, the point of his honesty. In the Secret History the Bagtor episode is told as by eyewitness, very specific, with direct speech. Who else had been there? Jochi came to grief in China at the age of forty-five; Hoelun had gone to her husband. Belgutei lived, but he wasn’t known to tell