services, frees from punishment unto nine crimes. When Tchingis distinguishes Jelme, for example, with this get-out-of-jail-free award, you can’t see Jelme going on a spree, and you don’t take the idea seriously – an empty honour, for the least likely. On the other hand, when I wonder at the number of chances, perhaps in fact they count to nine.
Now, they have a name to be scrupulous judges, with important persons not exempt. The amnesty goes counter, but comes into effect where they feel they owe. They have a huge sense of obligation, that’s always a mistake to underestimate. In the Secret History they cling to obligations, and one loyal deed isn’t quite undone until nine treacheries later – treachery that they hate like poison, but then they love loyalty like light and air. Without doubt, in the eyes of his Mongols, Tchingis had earnt an unofficial amnesty by the time he had his old crime written down. I imagine he scarcely caused a murmur, and that too is why the story didn’t travel. And this sets the scene for us, to understand young Temujin’s welcome home. His dedication to them had never come under question. Even his crime was for them.
Through him violence had irrupted into the Sacred Mountains, and yet the birds of Tergune Wood sheltered him from its intrusion. This chapter of his life, the weeks after he had slain Bagtor, with the phenomena around him seen under the influence of his father’s forgiveness, laid down strong lines in him, his encounter with grace and light. In his age they asked him, what was the zenith for you, what was the peak? The first time I felt the touch of divinity, he answered, with a yoke about my neck. The first time – not the last time – I was saved.
He had had a close shave, by the news. Bultachu fretted, “If the fake Turk king knew what he truly was... But Prajna, if Mongols knew what he was? There’d be no lack of hands – strong arms – to make sure he grows up. I can send them to him, Prajna.”
“Dear, doesn’t that create new dangers for him? To have the prophecy divulged.”
“Yesugei thought so. It isn’t up to me. I’m sworn to Yesugei, who’s beyond and can’t unswear me. But blast my fingernails, Prajna. I can’t just lie here.”
It obsessed him. Awake, asleep, and in sleep he had a dream.
He dreamt of deep, quiet waters, of rushes with the rusty flowers of summer, of birds abob fast asleep: Bor Nor. He stood on the shore, the lake to the horizon, the moon in the sky. From beneath the waters he heard gaiety, a carouse, the stallion’s lute, a fighters’ song in chorus. A glimmer in the water and up there swam, effortlessly like fish, two shadows, the figures of men. The first was Yesugei, his wide face in a laugh from the feast he had just left, his green velvet hat with bronze. He saw Bultachu and said to him, “I unswear you. Send him help.”
“You have a high old time here on our battleground, Yesugei.”
“What else, in high old company?”
Bultachu tangled eyes with the shadow beside him. “Who’s your comrade? He has silver in his nose.”
“Yes, the Tartar dead are with us.” Yesugei dropped a hand on the other’s shoulder. “We asked them to the feast.”
“And me?”
Now he smiled his mellow smile. “I’ve kept a cup aside.”
It wasn’t news. Bultachu had known in his bones lately. “Can I walk when I’m a shadow?”
“You can fly.”
“Or swim,” contributed the Tartar.
“Then I look forward to a drink with you, Yesugei. And your comrade.”
The water lapped and he awoke.
Bultachu set to, with urgency, for his time was short. When strong Mongols came to him and complained they rattled around like an unarticulated quiver, he sent them on assignment. “God has given us a khan. Go to him. Defend him in the anarchy of the times.”
A description of The Secret History of the Mongols
The Secret History of the Mongols is a life-and-times of Chinggis Khan, the Mongols’ first book. Why secret? It was kept in hoard by the royal clan, for insiders’ eyes only; it tells secrets, the clan seems to have felt, in later years as they grew more royal. No doubt there were controversies. There were internal wars, by Chinggis’ grandchildren’s day, with argument about what Chinggis stood for and which side was true to him. By that time, too, Chinggis was agreed to be an earthly god, whether factions listened to him or not, and the book isn’t the portrait of an earthly god – he is human, only too human. Today we suspect there was too much criticism of him, hence the secrecy.
It strikes us as strangely honest, for a monument to great times and the Mongols’ greatest figure. Scholars have even speculated that an enemy of his wrote his official biography. Which doesn’t make sense, but why include the negative material? Why tell us that as a boy he was scared stiff of dogs, and that as a teenager he slew his half-brother? If the Secret History hadn’t saved that fact from oblivion we’d never have known: every other account sweeps the incident under the mat. Here it’s a story told intimately, told by one who was there, who heard what his mother had to say to him. Chinggis lived to sixty and no-one else who was there outlived him. Conclusion? Do we conclude Chinggis told this story?
It was the Mongols’ first book. But they weren’t without examples for how to write their own story. Perhaps he took as his example the stone inscriptions left by the Blue Turks, that are a monument to great times and to glory, yet are strangely honest and not uncritical. They analyse where the Blue Turks went wrong and where they went right. That is the point of them, and they end with an exhortation to brother peoples who come after them to avoid their mistakes. These are the Turks’ first records, inscribed in the name of Bilga Khaghan (the Wise King-of-Kings). Perhaps Chinggis Khan, often acknowledged an heir, in ideology, to the Blue Kingdoms five hundred years on, had a similar concept for his history, a history that teaches lessons. Self-criticism? Yes, he can do that, there are instances in the book. I conclude he was too honest for his grandchildren.
There’s another funny thing about the Secret History: the conquests, which take up the last twenty years of his life, are skimmed over with an almost total lack of interest. For the conquests you have to go elsewhere, you have to go – to upset the bilig – to the losers, with caution, for a history written by them has bequeathed to us a great comic-strip villain. In the eyes of his own, his big achievement was to unify the nomads – who had lived under one government before, with the Blue Kingdoms and the magnificent Uighurs, but in his age were worse fragmented than they had ever been. Indeed, this task cost him more time and effort than the steppe’s subsequent vengeance upon China and the cataclysmic accidents of Turkestan.
What is the Secret History of the Mongols like? Not only in the character of Chinggis Khan but throughout, the human is uppermost. War goes on, as punch to the human interest. But history was seen like that, or experienced that way: history was more personal then. Or there and then, for that’s a truth indigenous to barbarians, east and west, to the other type of society that isn’t civil or civic. The political tale is the tale of his emotional life, to an extent out of the dreams of fiction writers... and this, too, is why the off-steppe wars cease to have significance for the chronicler-poet, who can’t get an emotional fix on them. He’s in his element in episodes of great behaviour and ambiguous behaviour, in crises of ethics and in consequences of actions, in shades to the minds of the heroes and the villains (the villains are a grey lot, and scholars can’t quite decide who they are). Its spine is the friendship-enmity, the love-hate, of Temujin, the future Chinggis, and his sworn brother and rival Jamuqa, who between them run a plot you’d fear to invent. Believe me, I’d fear to, and don’t have to; but motives aren’t spelt out – for how were they to be known, beyond self-report? – and motives I have to construct from people’s acts and quotes. I can tell you that gets tricky as our two thicken the plot. The other focus is on Chinggis’ companions, on anecdotes of their courageous loyalty, a theme and style strongly redolent of the companions of Kings Arthur or Charlemagne. It has been called a Morte d’Arthur of the steppe.
Is it a great work o
f art? It is art, it’s an epic chronicle, it’s historical fiction, of course, a species much more ancient than history. Speeches are put into mouths and moments of drama have been put into verse. There is a school that laments the Secret History as written down too soon and left to be an in-between beast, neither fish nor fowl, half-digested, the Trojan War not yet transmuted quite into Homer. It isn’t quite Homer, but never mind: what we have is the portrait of a legend-in-the-make from those who had known him, one concerned to be both the truth and art. I follow in its footsteps; I’m not out to dissect the text for its facts; its art, explored, has every bit as much to tell us about how people were.
Speed rescued the book from most sorts of censorship. There was a short addition on his son’s khanship, and while they were there, inserts of backdated or cosmetic titles (his father Yesugei gets to be Yesugei Khan, although no such thing). But that’s the only touch-up, after the end notice: Finished at a meet of the tribes in Hodoe Aral, the Month of the Roebuck, the Year of the Rat. To me the Rat Year has to be 1229, a year after Chinggis’ death. These are communal memoirs, but we assume a master-hand stitched them together. On who, most scholars give us three guesses. None of the