eat since yesterday sunrise – but he sent to the ger by Jochi the results of the whip-around, whatever aliment the twenty ex-Kiyat had on them.
Jochi delivered the bag and returned to him. “The kids are thrilled you’re back. Temulun, I don’t know where from, got the idea she’d never see you again. She was set to gallop after you – to spit fire in your aid, I guess, since she isn’t armed. They’re not allowed to come out.”
He didn’t venture on questions. He didn’t have to.
“Belgers, he’s been quiet – when isn’t he? – with his mother, mostly. But he’d have given me to know by now if he took against what we done. He’d have thumped me, and I say of Belgutei, a thump from him I’d feel. He hasn’t eyed me ill.”
Temujin didn’t altogether believe Jochi’s situation report, but he’d only tweak and you can’t tweak more than three-quarters the way from the truth. And that was comfort. “Has Hoelun banished me? Or ought I hide the axe?”
“How about me? I’m an ogre’s changeling. It’s a fair call. There’s a resemblance.”
At this effort to cheer him up Temujin tried to smile. “I’m...” But he found too hard to say. There were areas he couldn’t enter into consciously. Areas to do with his father, and with the faith his father had put in that stupid tolgechi’s stupid interpretation of the stupid, stupid clot of blood. The omen that only meant he was going to slay his father’s son.
None of this Temujin more than half-thought: he thought the stupid, stupid and left the rest to lurk in the depths like a pike.
“Oops,” said Jochi.
This was a caution or alarm: Hoelun had exited the tent. As she directed her step towards them in the gloom Temujin attempted to rally. “Promise me.”
“Yep.”
“If my head’s stuck on the battlements – I mean the lintel...” Halfway through he adjusted from a joke. “Deposit me on Holy Old Haldun. And tell Jamuqa –” he got into the spirit – “tell Jamuqa, don’t shoot your uglies. You might be sorry.”
Her tower hat cut out a triangle of starry sky. Her face was indistinct. Not in a scream she instructed, “Go inside, Jochi.”
“Tem and me...” he started, to be loyal.
“Jochi.”
With a pained mock-thump on Temujin’s knee he got up and traipsed towards the tent.
“Tell me what happened today, Temujin.”
He did. She cross-examined him for their comments on Tarqutai.
“Did you notice, Temujin, these three who offer to witness for you have to fear his mistrust, at least, incur his scrutiny? Quite possibly worse. You don’t want them to suffer for what they do for you?”
Uncertainly he shook his head.
“Tomorrow we can discuss this, Temujin. Tonight we need to eat and sleep. You’ll come into the tent and partake of what you have brought from them?”
His fingers curled in the dog’s ruff.
“Yesterday.” She tripped slightly. “Yesterday I was vehement. I don’t wish I had strangled you.”
He gave a nod.
As if involuntarily she went on, “There is... there is...”
He waited, with the wolf-fighter dog beside him and the heavy wagon chassis overhead.
“I have a message for you,” she rushed out. “A message for you from your father. He insists I say, he insists.” In a gasp, “Yesugei has forgiven you.”
Right away, this, a statement he’d have gone quickly to his ruin without, didn’t seep far into his numb mind. That took time. Nevertheless, when, after a few moments, his mother reached to him, he clutched her hand as one who fears to drown.
How can I watch my loved ones in conflict? You wonder, but I watch with less pain than you imagine. It’s more my fault than any, for a start.
No.
Why, yes, Hoelun, though you don’t like to say. You have bent over backwards to make up to Bagtor. I never meant ill. I didn’t know what to do. In the cracks he got neglected. The plague demon began with a child neglected.
Don’t yoke together...
Oh, Bagtor won’t make a demon. Do you know what’s he said to me, up here?
No, Yesugei.
See, I’d admitted to him he wants to haunt me, from a row of the faulty, and he came out, he has too much of me in him, to haunt.
Yesugei’s thoughts paused and she kept a quiet in her mind.
I’d tell you, Hoelun, how affected I am, only, you know. Even a spirit can be lost for words. Don’t mind about us. Here where we are, for the first time we see each other fully. I do better with him up here, Hoelun, I promise you. Can I be sad, who never saw my loved ones until now?
Later in the night he spoke again.
I have less pain, because of how we spirits see. The trees in the forest we see as they see themselves: every tree a universe unto itself in its own experience. This ability of sight our shamans call a sorrow, and yet they’d never swap, of course. Shamans feel the grief of each and every tree, a great sorrow, a great gift. – To you, I dare say, we can’t see the forest for the trees. To you we’re in a muddle.
It is just that we live on earth. Temujin does. On earth where we have earthly justice.
If you can find him a court.
I can punish him.
Now, Hoelun. Hoelun, we have one of them there with you and one of them here with me. Let us love them for each other.
She was moved.
Isn’t a shaman the hero who always puts his foot in the spokes of a vicious circle?
I said that.
Yes. There’s only one sensible way to assail a vicious circle. No haunts, Hoelun, no haunts. It is my motto. No feuds, no vicious circles.
I won’t make him vicious. I won’t eject him to fend for himself. That is how to make a savage beast. But he can’t get off scot-free.
Who ever got off scot-free? I never did in my life. I’m a skeptic on scot-free, scot-free’s a fantasy.
Yesugei, you are being too spiritual for me.
Try this simile for size. Perpetrators and victims? – insects at different stages of their life-cycle. The hairy caterpillar whom you’d never pick for a butterfly. The grub burgeoned into a huge green horsefly you want to swat – but do you want to, when you see him in his stages? When you see the whole of the cycle, blame becomes impossible.
Like the astrolabe whose rings-within-rings we failed to sort out.
Or that might be the right analogy for earthly justice. My judicial duties were a massive headache to me. First I had to learn the intricacies, then try to align the poor instrument to the heavens. A perfect analogy, Hoelun. Fortunately you and I don’t have to fiddle with the astrolabe, not in this case. It’s much simpler for us.
Simple, simple? she cried accusingly. You simplify, Yesugei. You are soft.
I can’t help that. It’s our great religious lesson. Toghrul tells me about a heresy popular on the steppe, Universalism, belief in the eventual salvation of the Devil and his legions, ultimately, their switch back to their angel origins. There’s our great religious lesson, still in the heads of the Christians. Our shamans are healers, our approach is medical. To the shaman’s instincts the Devil can only be a patient. Sick souls, damaged minds – why, our witch doctors see no evil. A circle is holy. We can only heal. That’s my lesson, Hoelun. We can only heal.
Have you talked to Toghrul lately?
Yes, I have. And he’s talked back to me.
Yesugei, are you here?
Either I’m here, or you’ve come over saintly.
Oh, you give yourself away. You’re me. Me, struggling to be you. What if I’ve got you wrong?
You’ve got me right.
10. A Yoke about his Neck
If a sparrow in escape from a sparrowhawk flies for refuge to a bush, does the bush shut its branches? The bush opens its branches and saves the sparrow’s life.
The Secret History of the Mongols, passage 85
Above them the Milky Way splurged across the sky and lavishly, ostentatiously outshone the other stars. B
ultachu liked to be outside. Their guests had gone in half an hour ago and yet he gazed overhead, without a change of face, without an avowal how he felt. The news about Yesugei’s son hadn’t been stressed, had almost been forgotten and left out, and Bultachu – speckled as he was with the pocks of random arrows – had grunted at most.
What have we come to, wondered Prajna, that in a batch of news we can make noises in our throats to hear of strife at our hearths, our children murderers?
A man in her husband’s condition, who is pushed on wheels or pulled on a sled, lives while he finds reason. People gave him reason. People came on pilgrimage to him, the Last of the Old Mongols, as to a reliquary, to a shrine, and for like purposes: to ask for guidance, to be blest by a glimpse of a higher life in his reminiscences. It wasn’t a career he ever saw for himself, he said, his second, a holy hermit in a cave with incense thrown at him. But he made a fist of it.
People came because he answered them with hope. Discreet though he had to be on his specific cause for hope – on God’s promise – in the pessimism of the times his belief in the future drew them and lifted their spirits. If the old hero, crippled since Bor Nor, they thought, can stay in heart and not despair of us, then so can I.
How was he to answer them now?
Prajna consigned to the pit the idiot boy. Not for what he had done, but for what he had done to her husband. Disappointment was more a blow to him than to a man on his feet. She who had patched him up and put him back together again, the way she fixed the carts and wagons only far more often, she was afraid for him. A wife knows a healthy hurt from insidious harm and she fears most a troubled wound, as when he has seen too much for