Of Battles Past (Amgalant #1)

butter that ever melted in his mouth, Temujin took opportunity to say, “I don’t know I’ll make the Guard, but whatever I make, I won’t forget the butter.” One of his attempts to unload his gratitude for a night out of the yoke.

  The boys ducked their heads. Until Tchilaun came up with the inquiry, “How’s your spit and polish these days, Temujin?”

  “Not bad. I can spit five feet now, every time.”

  Both of the boys were thirteen. Their father said, “Yes, the grass never grew that year, but my wives came over fertile.” That year was the year after Bor Nor, and Temujin believed there had been a rash of fertility. With them lived a grown-up sister, but no wives now.

  He bumped his yoke against their door.

  When Syorqan Shar saw him on his doorstep, like a stray mutt he had patted who now thought he had a new home, he waved his arms and mouthed his words much more vigorously than he said them. “No, no. Why did you follow me? Do you understand, we’re slaves? If we run away we’re hamstrung and God knows what, and if we help a runaway – no better. No better. Our hearts are cut out as untrue and fed to dogs. It’s in the oath we take, when we’re let loose to walk about.”

  “I’m very sorry, Syorqan Shar. I’ll go before I’m seen.”

  He had half-turned on the threshold when his elbow was grabbed and he was dragged inside. The door was softly shut behind him. This had been done by Tchimbai. Next to him Tchilaun stood, and his chest heaved at his father. “God’s sake,” he heaved out, damp at eye and mouth. “I’ll feed mine to the dogs myself, but we don’t give him up.”

  More sombrely, Tchimbai. “Yes, father, he’s come to us. We cannot possibly say no. 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. Our arms are open for him.”

  Their father, still of face, sidestepped around the group and went to roam his tent. For a while he nodded to the wall. He turned, hands at his waist, briefly cast a glance into his sons’ faces, and away. His left heel tapped on the floor. He turned. “Then take that torture instrument off him and burn the bastard.”

  Which meant the yoke, not Temujin.

  In the last quarter of the night Syorqan Shar and Temujin sat up together to churn, the boys asleep in spite of the excitement, the grown-up sister in her alcove behind a tapestry. Syorqan Shar issued a grunt. “Where’s Confucius when you need him?”

  “Sir?” Temujin had the urge to be terribly polite. Also he churned to his uttermost.

  “Filial piety.”

  “Oh.” Into this he crammed apology.

  “Confucius said, to become human is to conquer yourself and return to ritual. He conquered in himself four traits: opinionatedness, dogmatism, obstinacy and egoism. What do you, for instance, lad, make of the tenet?”

  “Um,” began Temujin.

  “To conquer yourself. Is that an aim of yours?”

  He took a moment. “For who?”

  “Ahh. Aren’t we smart? In the interests of society and the state, master Temujin, as your ancestors knew them, who knew better than you.” He held up a finger from his churn-stick. “The Confucian, as I, I admit dimly, understand him, is the arch-conservative, and with that a realist. He hates change – he fears violent change – and he hates an idealist, he hates and fears your messiahs and your utopias. New ones, anyway. Don’t you say he has his head screwed on?”

  This was a bit much for Temujin. Still, he had a reputation to upkeep and he tried... with a quote, though. “Um, we believe in the revolution of the wheels.”

  Syorqan Shar noised in his throat. “That’s a fact. We invented the bloody wheel. That’s a fact, too, and don’t let them tell you otherwise. China got the chariot off us ready-assembled and they had none of the parts. One has to ask, what did they do beforehand? That must be the age of liturgical stagnation Confucius harks to.”

  “What’s liturgical?”

  “By the prayer-book, lad, by the prayer-book. They have statesmen (in theory) whereas we have our charismatic kingships, we have, yes, messiahs. Is that a dirty word?”

  “It’s Christian.”

  “Oho. And he’s across the quip.”

  “Sorry.”

  “We’re individualistic and we’re popularist and – excuse my Christianity – we believe in messiahs.”

  Temujin smiled at him, because he half-smiled.

  “There’s plenty of violent change on the steppe, Temujin.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Fast change. Fast. If theirs is the edifice, ours is the hoof. Let’s not be afraid of change, let’s not be afraid of our children. It’s as simple as that.”

  Temujin smiled a bit more.

  “So where do I wind up? At the end of this rigmarole, into your inoffensive ear, master Temujin.”

  “I’m not a master.”

  “I’m not a sir. Am I to instil in my sons the unConfucian traits? Certainly they haven’t learnt not to have opinions, and if theirs differs from their father’s, why, that’s when the other traits kick in.” He turned his head to where Tchimbai and Tchilaun sprawled asleep, stroked his chin. “Have I told you how proud I am of them?”

  The sister, whose name was Hada, was wooed by several swains in the Scarlet Guard, the boys said. Interested – that is concerned – Temujin asked, without discourtesy, whether there were serious offers, from members of the Guard.

  “Dad says a face like hers fetches a decent husband and a decent husband’s what she’ll have. They do trip over themselves. And because there’s three or four of them he can up the ante. He doesn’t demand a price for her, only respect.”

  Tchilaun added, “We tell him, if he plays them right, we can see challenges and blood spilt.”

  Temujin was no judge of girls’ faces. “Your sister seems very nice.”

  Of course, Tchimbai got the elbow out. “Do I sniff an offer in the air?”

  He was above that line of attack. From the heights of fourteen he shook his head with pity down at thirteen and told him, “If I were an officer and a gentleman, yes.”

  Tchimbai grimaced daintily. “Eeeeew. It’ll be flowers next.”

  Tchilaun, on his other side, grinned. “Don’t discourage him, ’Bai. We’ll have you, Temujin, and we’ll get father to agree. And a pox on the Scarlet Guard.” For comic effect he thundered, “I won’t have my sister tupped by a rosette.”

  “’Laun.”

  “What?”

  The first day Temujin sat in Hada’s alcove, quiet as a mouse, amidst her girl-things. No-one went into the alcove. Then Syorqan Shar had a more ingenious idea on where to hide him: in the cart of wool out the back. Hada had been taken off the churn to card through a cart-load of Tayichiut sheep’s wool. They missed her on butter duty, but they had Temujin at nights. The wool was a hill-size heap, gritty, greasy and tangled, that a day’s work only put a dent in. It was perfect to hide Temujin.

  So he lay, stifled in lanolin, at the bottom of the cart. It got a bit hot in the afternoons. Hada, at her work on the driver’s bench, kept a hole down to him for an air passage, but pulled the wool over if people came by. Through the hours of the day she sang softly to herself. Always love songs. The sad passion, asunder, of two streams that merge at last in the ocean; a bear who snatches a girl, is slain by her father, but the girl laments to her grave; an outlaw has a wolf-wife. None of her songs were about officers of the Scarlet Guard. None were about fourteen-year-olds who didn’t shave, either. He’d have to start to shave.

  Where did that come from? That’s what mother tells me.

  On one of his dead-of-night transits between cart and tent she asked him in her musical voice, “Where did you get your eyes, Temujin?”

  He had no idea where he got his eyes. He thought of a lot of answers later. Nevertheless she smiled at him, kind, melancholy. It dawned on him how melancholy were her songs. He bumped into the cart.

  Disaster struck on the fourth day. Tarqutai had scoured the steppe; to
day, he ordered the camp ransacked. From princes to slaves, were his very words. “My foe has found a sympathiser here, and whoever I discover that to be, he won’t get the carpet treatment. Not for treason.” This was Tarqutai in a black mood. The carpet treatment is what important persons have a right to expect if they incur a capital sentence: wrapped up in tapestry and smothered. What treason brought upon you no-one knew. They were big and thundery words he used: foe, treason. Too big for me, Temujin felt. What harm am I to him?

  Privately to Syorqan Shar he suggested he crawl away and make like he had hidden under the vehicles.

  “That doesn’t save my children. Who took your yoke off? He’ll beat that out of you or bloody try.”

  “I did. I tore a wrist-sling on a nail.”

  The Suldu chief shook his head. “This is big league, Temujin. This is political to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Get in the cart as usual. It is still your best concealment. When you hear them go through our tent – if you hear us questioned, if you hear we are suspected, if he’s free with the whip – our lives depend on your silence.”

  “I understand.” He did as he was told.

  The day was havoc. For the First Prince of Tayichiut Tarqutai Kiril-Tuq to turn his Guard on his own clan, whom he had towed into princely title with him, unmasked Tarqutai the Tyrant, which also had a ring. The results came muffled to Temujin. Like the tempers, the heat hit boiling point that day. Temujin wasn’t supposed to move, but when his leg got a twinge and he tried, he found that the glue in his boots had gone liquid