him or lost the fight. However flinty-faced he feels he has to be out there, at home his hurts are searched; and so she said, “A queer piece of news. A sad disappointment to you, my dear.”
Slowly he came out of his abstraction. He munched, like an old man. Then he declared, “What you have to do to get into the news. Five years and no word he’s alive. As though nobody cared. Dead heroes’ sons, I understand, are three-for-a-goat these days. Still, you’d think people might investigate and not say, they’re rumoured to have starved in the mountains. Our own queen hasn’t been spotted now three winters, and that’s the news they tell me. By damn and by blast we need leadership.”
This avoidance was unlike him. “The thirst is there – that’s why they flock to you. The cream of them do. We needn’t give up hopes to live to see, Bultachu, leadership, safe hands, a future, even if not from the one we had vested our faith in.”
“You’re quick to write off Temujin. But that’s traditional. They wrote his great-grandfather off.”
Avoidance, or worse? “For drunkenness...”
“There was what he got up to when he was drunk. That young hooligan Khabul? – he’ll end on the gallows afore he’s wived. These Daft Bodonjar lookalikes, they take after Bodonjar, they get off to a slow start, or a messy start. Bartan, he was overemotional, he’d explode like Chinese firecrackers and they didn’t think he’d live to breed. They’re always touch-and-go. It’s a mark. They correct themselves. That’s a mark too.”
“To murder his brother.”
“You never know, maybe the principle works in inverse ratio.”
Right. He had decided to be preposterous. “People won’t have him. They won’t have him, Bultachu, end of story.”
“I’m afraid he’s to be had. He’s next in. When Tangr sticks his neck out with a forecast, Tangr knows the weather. The lad isn’t going for sainthood. Even if he were, a few saints were sinners once. It’s how they earn their stripes.”
“Bultachu.”
“Have a squint at the epics. In the epics, a hero, he never does things by halves. It’s how you tell him. I don’t mean us ha’penny ba’aturs, now, I mean the legends. Doesn’t matter what they do, they have to be wholehearted – wholehearted and a half.
Say have a draught of water – he gulps poison.
Say take off your hat, he twists off his head.
Say shed a drop of blood, he slits a belly.
Portrait of a hero. It’s the criteria. He overdoes. He goes too far. I don’t mean Cutula, now, who ate too much of a sheep. I guess that’s a rendition.”
“This is extravagance, my husband.”
“Extravagance: you’ve put your finger on the word. Extravagant energies, an exaggeration. Aren’t I right?”
“I am in general happy for epic characters to stay in the epics.”
“Once were history, you know, once were history. Once were the history-makers. Take into account what he has on. Only to fight Bor Nor again and win. Only to trounce Tartary and China. If he came to me to ask me how, I’d be a dead loss to him. I’ll tell you how, though, my wife: through what the legends have. No, this time we need one of them. This time Khabul might be too tame. Lay him on with a trowel. The legend, he’s described to curl your hair, he’s the bristly brindled blue-maned wolf, he glares red when he’s roused. Beneath that once was a person. What was he like? He gave a few people the willies.”
“Here rests your case for him?”
“You can’t do things by halves when you’re out to trounce China. You have to have a tendency to overshoot.”
“It’s a positive sign?”
“Are you so certain-sure it isn’t?”
Conceivably he knew more about heroes. Or not. She had to live with one. And now and then, indeed, he went beyond the limits of lesser mortals. She had learnt when to let him have his way. “Husband, after forty years, you haven’t lost your powers to strike me speechless.”
Incongruously to sense, he wasn’t crumpled up from the blow; his chest inflated and he winked at his wife. “No, I haven’t, but a chap’s a horny goat, laid on his back.”
“Bultachu, honest to God, you are, with the worst of them, impossible.”
“Oh, I’m quite possible,” he said.
“The dribblers have teethed. The chicks who tumbled out of the nest live, and moult their infant down.”
Tarqutai Kiril-Tuq, on the other hand, ill concealed his disappointment. Straight away he dispatched an officer of his Scarlet Guard to call the young delinquent to trial.
The officer met with more than he bargained for in the delinquent’s mother. Then again he ought to have known what to expect: her old intransigence towards the late Orboi Queen was a tale, and years of self-ostracism in the mountains hadn’t ameliorated Hoelun. Officer Toj had to take back to Tarqutai her rejection, on the brat’s behalf, of his rights over her and hers, his claim to chieftaincy. Of the four tribal rights – grass and water, aid in need, aid against enemies, justice – from him she had felt the advantages of none; after five years he thought to exert the last, the last without the others? If ever he had had rights they were forfeit.
Next step, Tarqutai sent a squad of the Scarlet Guard to arrest Temujin.
A Uriangqot in the early marshes with his elk saw them, didn’t like the look of them and jumped on his stag to warn Hoelun. The outer bog had puzzled them but they were through, and now, he estimated from the feel in the ground, only an hour behind him.
“They’ve come for me,” said Temujin.
“It is as I told you,” Hoelun answered swiftly. “You don’t think this eagerness sprouts from disinterested justice?”
“No, mother, I see.”
“Funnily enough, lamb, you threaten him. – Children, onto horse. Jochi... don’t forget your bow.”
Jochi’s face was fit to bottle as an elixir. “More like,” he spasmed on the quiet to Temujin.
Hoelun bustled them into the thickest of the forest. But they were kids on harebrained young horses and their pursuers a soldierly elite; shortly they glimpsed scarlet through the leaves. There was a fissure in a cliff with a narrow rear exit. They went to ground. Under-tens she sent into the dim, spiderwebby belly of the cave with the horses, and told Belgutei to pile branches across the mouth. Belgutei, boy giant, tore up trees the way others shred bark; Hoelun and Temujin stacked his wreckage into a barricade.
The squad, eleven guards and a guard-captain with scarlet rosettes on their breasts and a scarlet flag, both silk, trotted up and deployed in front of the cave. The captain announced, “We’re here to –”
“Miss them by a hair, Jochi,” were her instructions.
Arrows puffed past them and they flinched as from great snowflakes that nearly slapped into their faces. Out of the archer, at least, each close shave fetched a high-pitched pant. Squeal was unfair. Belgutei smiled to watch him. The squad backed off behind a screen of trees and the captain unslung his horn to talk. “There’s no need for that sort of an argument. We’re here to deliver Temujin to trial. He has undertaken to stand trial honestly. Why be idiots now? The rest of you, you’re of no interest to us – unless you harbour a fugitive. That’s what you’ll be, lad, a fugitive from justice, if you fail to answer to your chief. Be sensible, Lady Hoelun. Don’t force my hand.”
Resolutely – they had managed to scare him by this time – Temujin asked, “Do I go out, mother?”
“Yes. You go out the back.” She swivelled him by the shoulders towards the rear cranny of light. “Hide in the woods. Sit tight until you hear us call. Don’t be naive and listen to them, Temujin. Tarqutai’s motives leak out of the bag. Nowadays he is a big chief with aim to be the biggest, and we are rivals, the old chiefly family of Kiyat. I’d not be sworn he stickles at cutting heads off children, when they put their heads between his jaws. Even if he keeps you in the larder until you are fifteen. That isn’t far away.”
He gawped up over his shoulder. “I won’t be naive, mother.”
In one of her casu
al horoscopes she told him, “Why, you will live and die naive. Go.” She urged him with a shove.
On the upper side of the cliff Temujin had thought to slip into the deers’ tunnels. Instead he came out on an acre burnt naked. They hadn’t smelt the ashes in the cave. If he crossed the burnt ground he must be seen by the Tayichiut beneath. After the empty patch stood the eaves of Tergune Wood, untouched by fire. Not even deer had paths through Tergune Wood, trodden only by the light feet of birds, its triple crags of whitish stone a birds’ temple, said the Uriangqot. It was try his luck there or go back into the cave and start a serious fight. Aloud he petitioned the spirits of the wood, “May I come in? I have nowhere else to go.” And he pelted upslope.
The Tayichiut sighted him and gave chase. Glittery greens swathed the trees to their feet, like a stallion who has to toss his head to see. The undergrowth was a jumble, a jungle. Even if he had to unhorse and wriggle, he had twelve soldiers on his tail and he was keen to get in. Dead ahead he saw a dark hollow, roughly the size of a door. For once his horse didn’t jib but trotted right in with forward ears. With dark tangle either side of them they went as freely as on grass, without a twig or a root to lash or trip them. The spirits of the wood had answered him.
Echoey and indistinct of direction, he heard the squad blunder about the trees that obstructed them. “Where did he go in? Did you see where?” They made a comedy, if you listened from safety. They