Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1)
tales against Temujin. Besides, the greatest Mongol ever, by his contemporaries’ general consent, must have had a say in his biography. It was being put together in his inner circle, in his last years. In his last years Tchingis Khan was the greatest monarch on earth, and might have had written what he liked. Other monarchs did. Image, disinformation, propaganda: these were understood concepts, heavily used in Central Asian states; and his Mongols were the cutting edge in psychological warfare – his employment of which in Turkestan has effect to this day (in brief, he encouraged fear of the Mongols, and did their reputation permanent damage. Scare tactics were old Hun craft in China. Neither Hun nor Mongol thought of our perceptions of them, only of the enemy’s perceptions.) But image-manipulation was a part of licensed untruth in wartime, and this was his life story. This was the Mongols’ first book. Mongols don’t lie. In his army he had a cult of honesty going, no less: take the famous case of the two night guards. For a soldier to sleep on nightwatch was grave dereliction; the consequences might be fatal to his comrades, and were fatal to the culprit. These two soldiers were charged on assumption. They hadn’t been seen asleep, but they were questioned in court: were you? Yes, they answered. We have report of the trial from a Tajik (native to Iran) who seems to have been upset by the element of self-harm. He was there with a Mongol friend, to whom he said: They’re under suspicion. It’s circumstantial. In your system the death sentence needs a confession. There are no witnesses to convict them of falsity. They only have to say they weren’t asleep. The answer from his friend? A Mongol doesn’t lie to save his life. Which was seen to be nothing other than the truth when they were led away for execution, the Tajik observer’s lunatics for honesty, but with Mongol homage to their championship of the standard, their exemplar of the phrase. Me, I hope and trust they went to the block with more pride than shame.
So, was Mongol number one to lie? Wasn’t he obliged to be hanged for a self-discovered crime? Yes, he thought so. A lie wouldn’t have been hard, no more than for the two soldiers. He only had to murmur, let’s not mention Bagtor. Because nobody did. In Rashid a-Din the half-brother simply drops out of the story – not Rashid a-Din’s only obfuscation or omission. Nowhere else is there found an account of his fate, nowhere else but in the Secret History, down to modern times. One can cover up a crime for centuries, without much trouble; Tchingis has the opposite trouble, he has to insist on dragging his sins into the light. That is, he’s the Scourge of God and the Accursed to enemy correspondents on the Turkestan campaign; information and disinformation both surge freely to blacken his name. But there is no-one to tell you he murdered his brother, like Cain. No-one but Temujin, a half-century after the deed.
Jochi’s conduct was that of a second in an affair of life and death: he didn’t interrupt or interfere, he followed instructions.
“I don’t want any accidents,” said Temujin. “We do this as simply as possible.”
“Right.”
“Save the fancy stuff for duels.”
“I get you.”
They talked within sight of Bagtor. Up on Olir Ulqu, Sour-Pear Promontory, he sat with his chin on his knee. Beneath in the river meadow grazed their nine cut mounts by Toghrul’s stallion. To watch the horses graze is Mongol slang for to be alone and think, and by his attitude he was doing that.
Had he been animal quarry they might have taken the shot, him on the knoll against the sky. Executions, however, want precision. Rear of him the ground lay flat and stony for thirty yards, then there grew clumps of sour-pear bush, waist-high. “I approach along the promontory. Jochi, you climb the trail from the river. On the trail he can’t see you unless he stands up. If he stands up, I’m on the level behind him and I always have a shot.”
“He can’t fire that bow.”
“On the off-chance he manages to we’d need rhinoceros hide. Exercise caution, Jochi, or this is your last time in action with me.”
Jochi answered with a noise that he translated as obedient.
“In a quarter hour I’ll emerge from the bushes. You be under the rim. Use the time and stalk quietly, as you can.”
“What say he doesn’t sit there?”
“I have him in sights. In case you startle him, in case of – I don’t know what, my end – act normal. What we’re here for won’t cross his mind, from you, unless you tell him.”
“Why not from me?”
“Don’t feel slighted.”
“He’s the first of a thousand for me.”
“Jochi.” He stopped. “A quarter hour: start now.”
The nine horses, like their sire cream in the coat with white manes and tails, were aware of them and bent their swan’s necks to investigate, from one to the other at Bagtor’s front and back. But they were accustomed to boys’ antics and dropped their heads to tear the sward again. Out of habit Bagtor did a once-about with the horses, and where he squirmed through the sour-pear Temujin had a glimpse of his face. Not judged, in his solitude, to wring the milk of human kindness from his murderer: morose and vindictive the tale of his thoughts.
At the end of a quarter-hour count in his head Temujin stepped out of the bushes. He had his arrow on the string, lightly drawn; his thumb, poised, held the inside-out coil of his bow, the pull-against-the-push. He said, “Bagtor.”
Gawkily Bagtor jumped up and about. What he saw he met with a puff, hah. Next he peered to see whether Temujin were serious. He determined that he was and did hah again. “Oh, Temujin.” He wagged his head. “Oh, Temujin.” He stooped to peer at him, once again, lest he had dreamt him up. “Captain,” he blew on a gale of laughter. “Here’s Captain Right-and-Wrong to the rescue. Oh, go ahead, Temujin, go ahead.”
In his suspension – his still float, the hover of the killer bird – Temujin wasn’t to be laughed at. He watched Bagtor’s laughter as the hawk watches, or hyper-watches, for he starts to see his target’s actions a fraction ahead of time. That is how engaged he is with the other creature. But he doesn’t talk to him.
It’s about the skill. The hawk’s faculty to construe his target. It’s the killers that are intelligent. Killer animals have their weapons forged onto the flesh, as clever as our contrivances for war. A tiger is a contraption, a superb one. The falcon has no equal but the bow. The bow, the ultimate for one thousand, two thousand years, unchanged, the bow has known perfectibility, like the falcon without a rival in her skies. With my bow I am akin to them, the running, flying arsenals, and theirs is the kingdom, the power and the glory, theirs is the joy in skill. Why? Because I can.
In Temujin’s ominous silence, Bagtor wasn’t intimidated from his laughter – he finished his laughter. Or he never quite finished, for he kept a gloat. Time must have slowed for him, too; Temujin saw his calculations in his incandescent face, in the crackle and spark. Then he decided what to do. Bagtor sat back down, crossed his legs and closed his eyes.
Steppe people sit with a foot underneath them and the other knee up, in a half-squat as springy as a cat’s crouch. Only Uighur mystics sit shut-eyed, their feet upon their thighs. It may have been the grovel of the wolf, don’t hurt me, I’m no harm to you. It may have been that Temujin did what he least expected, gave away to him the high ground, which he promptly sat on in the pose of a fresco saint. It may have been dignity.
It didn’t stop him. The hare’s last hope, to freeze, doesn’t stop the hawk. He stretched out his fatal feet, he tautly drew. Like most creatures that strike he went for death on the instant. It’s about the skill. It was about ballistics: he had selected a heavy gauge grooved for spin, that ill-made wobble horribly, that left the issue in no doubt. The hawk can go right through the hare, the falcon by mistake can scissor her catch in two. It drilled through rib in his left chest, skewered his heart, poked his garments inches out at the back. Bagtor jolted with its silent violence, skidded left to face away, sagged; his crossed legs kept him upright.
The tiger purrs with his muzzle in hot guts. For half a moment Temujin purred, or perched on his rabbit and neatened up
his wrist ruffs.
It is often observed of him, in the books, that he didn’t indulge, enjoy, that he eschewed cruelty for cruelty’s sake, that what he did in war he did, at least, without the taint of lust. These were the inhibitions he put up, because of Bagtor. He never fought an individual, either, unless you count the foreign kings and governors whose heads he sought for treaty-breach, instigators of wars. Abstemption from the challenge, absence from the sack of the capital of China: how far wound the effects of Bagtor? He had no way to know. It came with a bad side, his divorce from the instinct, from animal innocence.
A shot not his rudely awoke him. To shoot your quarry twice, whether he twitches or not, puts him out of any misery he’s in. But when Jochi shot the sitting corpse and with surgical exactitude inserted his arrow alongside Temujin’s, when the corpse jerked around again to face him and flailed its arms like a zombie getting up...
It was Temujin’s character to hang onto an outward tranquillity, and as much of an inner as possible. He thought of his kid brother. “Stay where you are,” he called across to Jochi, and walked forwards.
Two arrows transfixed Bagtor, both out at the back, though neither had pierced his Uriangqot jacket. He slumped half-over in a lurch, stuck by