again and attached him by sticky strands to the cart bottom. He had never heard of that. The wool felt heavy on his chest, and he didn’t have Hada to keep his air hole open. If he smothered here he’d have a death fit for a prince. On his experience so far he didn’t know that was such a honour. For hours he lay and listened, and lost his sense of time.
Footsteps to his cart. Terse soldierly instructions. “Dump this wool out. Empty the cart.” Creaks as two of them climbed up either side by the high wheels.
Fate spelt the end of his tale, then. Perhaps he ought to have noticed. Why, why had he involved the Suldus?
Less soldierly footsteps, and a voice he had heard a lot of: Syorqan Shar had joined them. In his rattle-on way he talked them through their work, and didn’t seem to mind whether he were listened to or not. “Funny old day. Tarqurs in a tizz. And you of the Guard cop the jobs, of course. My, you’re thorough. Have to admire you. A day like today, under that load of wool? If he’s silly enough to crawl in there he’s dead of heatstroke.”
Temujin, his wits at a high revolution, thought, that’s for me. Make like I crawled in here.
The right wheel agreed, “It’s a hot one.”
The left wheel laughed, “He isn’t wrong. Turn out every chest, but this is ridiculous. The wool scorches me hands. It’s runny with the grease. Think I’m about to faint.”
“You can’t faint.”
“I tell you I can, lieutenant or not.”
“Come off the cart, you sad case. Before you go in head first. Syorqan, no joke, he’s drained as cheese. Got a drink for him?”
“Got a drink, yes. – Daughter.” His voice turned, turned back again. “Milk’s in the larder, six foot deep. Ought to do the trick.”
On the left wheel the lieutenant groaned, “I need my mother’s milk.”
“Eh. Buck up. That’s an order.” Each side of the cart the wheels creaked as both of them clambered down. “Bless you, lass,” said the one who wasn’t a lieutenant. “I wish you were our last tent, Syorqan, but you aren’t. God save you for the milk.”
“No trouble.” The three voices drifted away.
Much later, much much later, he heard Syorqan Shar again, and a hand groped. “Lad. Tell me you’re not dead of heatstroke.”
Temujin gasped and batted through wool for the hand. They pulled him out. It was night. They medicined him with milk, inside and outside too; Hada laid a milk poultice on his head. It helped.
“Are you fit to set out tonight, lad, on horse? I have to urge you do. Not at once. In an hour or two.”
“Yes, I’ll be fit.”
In half an hour he was sitting up. To Syorqan Shar he said, “You were very brave. I thought we were goners – I thought I felt one of them scrape against my foot – and then you spoke up. As nonchalant as I don’t know what.”
“Way to go, dad.”
“I wasn’t very brave,” the father grumped as his boys grinned at him. “I was very hysterical on the inside. To lie there at risk of suffocation and trust to us, that’s sturdy. I ought to have known from the water, but I thought you’d bolt.”
“Mostly I was half flaked out. Glued down, too.”
“You were half dead, lad. And you didn’t lose your head.”
“No, I’m about to take leave of Tarqutai and I haven’t lost my head. It’s a wonder.”
Under the floor felt Tchimbai and Tchilaun kept two contraband arrows – the tribe of Suldu weren’t permitted arms. Told about these, Temujin had nodded keenly: two arrows? “They’ve got names. Kiril-Tuq and Girte.” Now they lent him Kiril-Tuq and Girte, along with a bow that was layers of reed stuck together. “It does work. It’s short-distance. Twenty yards accurate, forty yards wild.”
“It’s brilliant.”
Hada gave him a bag of butter, a sack of crisp curd biscuit and sun-dried mutton strips, out of the larder: a few weeks’ keep. The horse, the only one they had to get about on, was an ex-milch mare past her days of yield, who had never known more than a halter in her life; that was how he had to ride her. She was like the wild horses, a dull yellow with bristles of black hair, black legs, ears outlined and stripe down the spine, and she was almost as wide as tall from the summer grass. “She’ll walk forever, Temujin, but she has no sense of haste.”
“She’s lovely.” Where they had smuggled him and the mare, the moon still in her glory time of year, mottled of silver and iron in an enchantment of light, he left them with a little speech. “I’ll never forget what you’ve done. Now when the moon pours down her grace, wishes are most likely to come true. Mine is to meet again.”
And so he waddled away.
A murderer comes home. Does he?
If he felt home was better off without him, here was his opportunity, with the least mess and questions left. Simpler for the kids to believe he hadn’t survived. Like when you make your death look accidental.
And go where? Far away, to be fate unknown. Far in the west, boys without prospects or under a cloud give themselves up to the slave traders and join the mamlukes. They say families take to market boys who are only a mouth to feed. You wonder at that. But the red-head stranger, at the end of his contrivances to live, sold his child to Temujin’s ancestor. The west is where tribes and peoples are shoved in defeat, off the steppe or half off. Temujin’s own mother might have sold him for a soldier, since he was only trouble at home. At least they feed you and equip you, and they train you in barracks like towns that you don’t see the outside of until you graduate. They acquaint you with the great world you fight for, but they don’t teach you too much – a mamluke is for combat. They want their soldiers straight off the steppe. Though wives of their own ilk are shipped in, a mamluke’s son can’t be a mamluke, so quickly is the raw material diluted or sophisticated. It was uncannily like Tarqutai’s ideas for him. And had an attraction. Start again, new identity, leave his past life behind. To go for a mercenary soldier this end of the steppe wasn’t on, but what about the west end? Talent can take you anywhere. Sevuq Tegin, a Turk from Issyk Kul, captured as a child in a tribal war and sold in the slave markets, climbed to a governorship, out of which his son Mahmud of Ghazna built a vast kingdom across Outer Persia and North India with his mamluke army and his war elephants.
The case against? When they heard of the greatness of Mahmud of Ghazna, the Iron Khan and the Idiqut between them sent their congratulations and asked for his friendship, on the grounds he was steppe. But he answered, You are infidels. Convert, and I’ll have truck with you. It wasn’t much unlike this end of the steppe, then. Temujin had always thought he’d be a Mongol when he grew up.
Several books – scholarly, but here unscientific – assert that Temujin gave never a sign of a guilty conscience over Bagtor. You can’t make such statements, because there isn’t the evidence, either way. Perhaps he thrashed himself nightly with thorns and the information hasn’t come down to us. But that does seem unlikely for him.
For a start he didn’t have the self-division whereby you flagellate your sins. Because he didn’t have a cosmic division, God and the Devil or a Power of Light and a Power of Dark. His religion is often characterised as a religion of help, of practical help amidst the ills and sorrows of this existence, neither the priest – the shaman – nor his patient concerned with their scoresheet in the next. The shaman helps to help, not to rise in the spiritual ranks and reach a blessed state. His client wants to find his cow or cure his boils.
Zoroaster’s was the old religion where humans fought on God’s side as whole units, not their soul versus their matter, but both soul and substance on God’s side, against the negative, against the evils of death. So the old Persian chivalry were knights of God truly and untroubled, their undamned flesh a knight’s gauntlet, his equipment, that he keeps with pride, that he loves. Temujin’s religion wasn’t like that, but like that didn’t split him from himself. He healed faster, after errors that weren’t sins. And he had that optimism about the world that Zoroaster’s set used to have, before the self-conflic
t religions took over.
Temujin thought about these things: he thought about a healthy self, he thought that you don’t give up, no, not on yourself. He knew that knightly want to be active, he wasn’t going to lock himself up in a monastery. He saw no use, even, in sackcloth. His attitude boiled down to, I’ll have to do better.
What did the people around him make of his case, how did others judge him? There, too, we have no direct evidence; but we can spot cultural factors. Analysis of justice, even for Chinese and Persian areas under Mongol government, remains in a tentative state. It seems that in China the Mongols weighed the scales, strongly, towards leniency: they halved capital offences. It seems that in Persia there was public confidence in Mongol courts, where important persons weren’t exempt. Tchingis Khan’s famous Great Jasaq or legal code is lost, guessed-at, doubted altogether, and was used in tandem with local justice.
The Secret History, uniquely a Mongol document, is where to ferret for attitudes. In its pages I have been struck by the second chances and the third people can be given. I’ve thought, isn’t patience exhausted? I’ve thought, why haven’t they got rid of this guy? There’s a persistence with people that I don’t expect in the bloody tale.
It’s as though the nine-times amnesty is in silent operation. The amnesty, a traditional steppe grant for great