Ruler of the Sky: A Novel of Genghis Khan Read online

  “So I have seen.”

  “It's my fault,” Sochigil said. “Somehow, I've failed him. I try to be a good wife. I've always done what he wanted.”

  “He may like it better when you don't,” Hoelun said. That was certainly true in bed. Yesugei seemed more aroused when she fought him, more fervent when he had to overpower her.

  “More men are with him now,” Sochigil went on, “than when we were wed last summer, and he's bound to win more followers. Being his second wife may be better than being the chief wife of another man.”

  Hoelun studied Sochigil's pretty, accepting face. “He is fortunate to have a wife who cares so much for him.”

  “I never gave him cause to doubt me.” Sochigil sighed. “I thought, when Bekter was born, he would come to love me more.”

  “I will always honour and respect you, Sochigil Ujin,” Hoelun said. The other wife's passivity would make her own life easier.

  5

  A lamb boiled in the pot over Orbey's hearth. The women had finished making their images, stuffing the felt with dry grass and sewing the ends together before praying over the dolls. These images of household spirits would hang inside their yurts to protect them, keeping evil at bay. A shamaness chanted near the fire as two other women put pieces of the sacrificed lamb on wooden platters.

  Hoelun glanced at the Khatuns. Orbey had seated her next to Sokhatai. Hoelun forced herself to smile as Sokhatai offered her meat.

  “May the spirits protect us,” Orbey said, “and watch over the new wife of Yesugei Bahadur.” Nekun-taisi's wife was here, along with the young wife of Targhutai and several other women, and Hoelun had seen that all of them were wary of the old dowagers.

  Orbey looked towards Hoelun; the old woman's black eyes glittered. “Yesugei's brother, the Hearth Prince, tells the story of your capture well.”

  “Daritai Odchigin seems to have a way with stories,” Hoelun responded.

  “He speaks so movingly of how you wept,” Sokhatai said. “I wonder. Sometimes a story-teller hides the truth for the sake of lovely words or a phrase's rhythm. Maybe you didn't weep so much at your plight.”

  Sochigil drew in her breath. In the silence, Hoelun heard Bekter whimper faintly; Nekun-taisi's wife was suddenly fussing over the cradle that held her son Khuchar.

  “You are mistaken, Honoured Khatun,” Hoelun said. “I was with my first husband for only a few days, and wept greatly at losing him.”

  Orbey leaned forward. “But now,” she said, “you belong to a man who is the grandson of a Khan and nephew of another. The Odchigin says that his brother had to have you when he saw you by the Onon, displaying yourself in no more than an undergarment. I find that strange. There you were, a new bride, not keeping yourself decently covered while riding through strange territory. Maybe you had already tired of your husband. Perhaps you summoned spirits from the river to lure Yesugei to your side.”

  Hoelun stiffened. They would not dare to insult her husband openly, but might strike at him through her.

  “The weather was warm,” she said evenly. “My husband expected no enemies to cross our path. He was mistaken, but I cannot dwell on what is past. I'm not the first woman who has had to dry her tears and make peace with her ravisher,”

  Orbey's lip curled. Hoelun supposed that she should pity the Khatuns, with their husband so cruelly killed and their sons dead in battle, but she despised them. These people had enough enemies, and had to remain united; the two were thinking only of their own failed hopes.

  Orbey said, “You're a proud one.”

  Perhaps they were testing her. “By serving my husband,” Hoelun said, “I serve you as well. The Bahadur will seek my advice, and I shall ask for counsel from older and wiser people. But we should be thinking of the spirits we have gathered to honour, Wise Ladies, not these other matters.”

  The other women were staring at her now. Orbey held out a horn of kumiss. Hoelun had won, at least for the moment.

  The yurt in which Hoelun sat, where Yesugei had first taken her, had been his mother's. No mistress ruled it now, but he had promised to give it to her when she had a son. In the meantime, she and Sochigil tended to it, and their husband often met there with his men, as though his mother were still alive to serve them. Yesugei held court there as if he were a Khan.

  Hoelun and Sochigil sat at their husband's left. Bekter, swaddled and tied to his cradle, lay between them. Yesugei was sitting on a cushion in front of the bed, his men at his right. A few small boys had been allowed to join the men, and Charakha was telling a tale.

  He spoke of a woman called Alan Ghoa, an ancestor of the Borjigin clans. The men, most of whom were already drunk, seemed content to listen to the story again.

  Yesugei's eyes darted restlessly, then narrowed as he gazed at Daritai, who sat next to Targhutai Kiriltugh. The two brothers had been arguing again earlier. Charakha's son Munglik was staring intently at Hoelun. She shook her head, for the boy should have been listening to his father; this tale was one he would have to learn.

  “Alan the Fair seated her sons before her,” Charakha continued, “and handed each an arrow. Each brother took his arrow and—” He paused. “Munglik.”

  The boy started, then blushed.

  “You're not listening,” Charakha said. “We'll see what you remember. Each of Alan Ghoa's sons held his arrow. What happened after that?”

  Munglik's cheeks grew redder. “Each broke his shaft easily.”

  “And then?”

  Munglik bit his lip. “Alan Ghoa tied five arrow shafts together, and gave the bundle to each son in turn, but they were unable to break it.”

  Charakha nodded, then said, “Alan the Fair told her first two sons, 'You've doubted me. You've said that, even though your own father is dead, I have given birth to three more sons who have no father and no clan. You mutter of how a servant has lived in my tent, and say that he must be their father. But I tell you that your three brothers are the sons of Koko Mongke Tengri, the Eternal Blue Heaven above. At night, a man as yellow as the sun came into my tent through the smoke-hole on a beam of light, and he is the father of your brothers.' “

  The boys nodded solemnly. Hoelun wondered how these men would react to such a tale from their own mothers, but everyone knew that signs from Heaven were more numerous long ago. Alan the Fair had promised her sons they would be rulers, and descendants of hers had been Khans, which seemed to prove the truth of the tale.

  Charakha turned to an older boy. “And what did Alan Ghoa say to her sons then?”

  The boy cleared his throat. “She said, 'All of you were born from my womb, and I am the mother of all of you. If you separate yourselves from one another, each can be broken as easily as those single shafts. If you are bound together as tightly as the bundle you could not break, united in one purpose, no one can break you.' “

  Charakha peered at Daritai, then at Yesugei. The Bahadur glared back at Charakha, then suddenly grinned.

  “A man can't stand on one leg!” Daritai shouted, and gestured with his horn. Hoelun got up to pour more kumiss. The men muttered of a raid they would make later in the season when their horses had put on more weight. Targhutai's brother Todogen Girte stumbled outside to relieve himself. Two men leaned over a third, forcing his lips open as they poured kumiss into his mouth. One man began to sing and others quickly joined in, the raid forgotten.

  Bekter wailed; Sochigil leaned over the cradle. Yesugei waved a hand at his wives. “Leave us.”

  Hoelun wanted to refuse, but Sochigil rose and picked up her son. Yesugei's face darkened as Hoelun gazed up at him. “I told you to leave,” he said. “Go to your tents.”

  Hoelun waited as long as she dared. Yesugei raised his arm, and she got up and followed Sochigil outside.

  Hoelun woke. The raucous sounds of the men were fainter, but Yesugei had not come to her tent. Maybe he was with Sochigil. She stretched against the cushions. I'll tell him, she thought, that I still think of Chiledu when he's with me. It was not tr
ue, but it was a way of getting to him. I'll tell him that I only pretend to feel pleasure with him, and then he'll never be sure if I have.

  She was suddenly aware of the dampness between her legs. Her monthly bleeding had started. There would be no child of Chiledu's, no link to her lost husband.

  Someone was retching outside. She was about to get up to put on a loincloth of skins when Yesugei entered, weaving as he stumbled towards the bed.

  “Get out,” she said, “or a shaman will have to purify you.”

  He swayed unsteadily. “We'll hunt tomorrow, you and I.”

  “I can't handle weapons now,” she said. He sat down heavily and grabbed at her. “Don't touch me. You can't stay here—you shouldn't even be inside. You'll have to go to Sochigil. My monthly bleeding has begun.”

  He stared at her, then laughed. “Good,” he muttered as he got to his feet.

  “I wanted his child,” she said.

  “I don't believe you, Hoelun. You want your place as my first wife now.”

  “I won't ever love you.”

  “I don't really care.”

  He turned and left her yurt. With a pang of regret, she realized that she could not call up a clear image of Chiledu's face. She remembered only a distant rider, fleeing from her as his braids beat against his back.

  6

  Hoelun worked at a hide. From the higher ground where her yurt stood, she could see to the southern end of the camp. Yesugei's people had moved near the end of summer, stopping on the eastern side of the Onon, under the high cliffs bordering the Khorkhonagh Valley. White clouds of sheep, mottled with the grey and black of goats, grazed near camping circles; cattle roamed the flatter land near the river that snaked through the valley.

  The women near Hoelun chattered. Sochigil was making a rope of twined horsehair and wool; those women not watching the sheep sewed or worked at hides. Autumn was approaching, the season for war, and the camp was filled with talk of battle. Yesugei wanted to strike at the Tatars before his enemies attacked him. The loot of a Tatar camp would include goods from Khitai.

  Yesugei despised the rulers of Khitai, and not only because the Kin had made allies of the Tatars. Once, the Kin had roamed the wooded lands north of Khitai, but had let themselves be softened by the settled ways of townsfolk. Before that, Khitans who had roamed the steppes had ruled there, but they had grown weaker in the new realm that was still called by their name. The Kin had found the Khitans and their subjects easy prey. Some of the Khitans had fled to the west, to claim a new kingdom they called Kara-Khitai; those remaining inside the Great Wall now served the Kin.

  Two pairs of booted feet stopped near her. Hoelun looked up at Daritai's broad face. Todogen Girte was with him; his sullen face was much like his brother Targhutai's. Daritai's eyes lingered on her. He smiled at her too often; it was time he found a wife of his own.

  Daritai waved an arm at the giant tree beyond the camp. The tree's wide, leafy boughs cast a shadow over the ground underneath. “There it is,” Daritai said, “the tree where my uncle Khutula was proclaimed Khan. When the kuriltai chose him, the men danced until the dust reached their knees, and their feet beat a ditch into the ground.” The Odchigin should not have been reminding Todogen that the Taychiut's father had been passed over by that assembly of chiefs and nobles for Khutula.

  “They couldn't have made a deep ditch,” Hoelun said, “since I saw no sign of it.”

  Todogen laughed; the two men walked away. Hoelun scraped the hide with her bone tool. Two women whispered to each other. One of them glanced at Hoelun, then covered her mouth. Sochigil leaned forward, anxious to overhear.

  Hoelun knew what the women were saying. Sochigil had carried the gossip to her, while insisting that no one believed it. Such doubts did not keep others from murmuring that Daritai was too friendly to his brother's new wife, and that Hoelun encouraged him.

  She scraped at her hide. Targhutai and Todogen were often with Daritai; they would speak carelessly to their grandmother Orbey without thinking of what they said. The old woman would have spread such stories.

  She would have to confront Orbey before the men left to fight.

  Leaders of other clans were summoned to Yesugei's camp for a war kuriltai. Among these Noyans were his Jurkin cousins and Altan, the last son of Khutula. The number of horses tethered in the space beyond Yesugei's tent grew, and Hoelun admitted to herself that she might have misjudged her husband. Some of these men might have claimed the right to lead, but were willing to follow Yesugei.

  Yesugei sent out his scouts. The shaman Bughu studied the stars, then brought three clavicles from dead sheep to the chiefs. When the bones were burned, all three cracked in straight lines down the middle: the omen was clear. Yesugei took off his belt, hung it around his shoulders, and offered his prayers as a sheep was sacrificed. They would ride out in three days.

  The men now spent most of their time lacquering their leather breastplates, honing and oiling their knives and hooked lances, practising with their bows, and grazing the horses they would ride. The rest of the work had fallen to the women, the old, and the boys still too young to go to war.

  Hoelun walked past a flock of sheep grazing near her camping circle; her turn at herding would come tomorrow. The women outside the tents chattered as they spread out wool, knelt by their long hand-looms, and hung out strips of meat. Preparing for battle always lifted people's spirits. Men had to fight, instead of waiting for war to find them. They could hope someday to carry war far from these grazing grounds to the east, where the Kin and those they ruled hid inside their dwellings, to the oases south of the Gobi, and to the west, at the ends of the trails the caravans followed. Yet Hoelun could still dream of a land where no one had to search the horizon for signs of an enemy.

  A vision suddenly seized her. She saw other plains and pastures, and vast camps forced to bow to one Khan. Tengri had a purpose in forging His people into a weapon: to hurl them at those who were weaker. Her vision faded as she neared another circle of wagons and tents. It was useless to think of this now, when she did not know what the next day would bring.

  Orbey and Sokhatai sat outside a tent, mending garments. Near them, three women beat at a mass of wool with long sticks, softening it so that the fibres would mesh.

  Hoelun bowed from the waist. “Greetings, Honoured Ladies. I wish to speak with you, if you will allow it.”

  “Greetings, young Ujin.” The wrinkles around Orbey's narrow eyes deepened as she peered up at Hoelun. “And have you finished the work of the day so soon?”

  “I have beaten wool all morning. It's drying now, and my other tasks can wait. I wanted to pay my respects to you, and also to speak of a matter that concerns me.”

  Orbey glanced at the other Khatun, then waved a hand. “Please be seated.”

  Hoelun inclined her head. “Perhaps we may speak inside,” she said softly. The other women looked up from their wool.

  “Very well.” Orbey stood up slowly, still holding her sewing, then helped Sokhatai to her feet. Hoelun followed them into Orbey's yurt. The old women sat down at the back, just beyond the beam of light shining through the smoke-hole; Hoelun knelt in front of them and sat back on her heels.

  Sokhatai's dark eyes were as hard as the black stones hanging around her neck. Orbey reached for a jug, sprinkled a blessing towards her ongghon, then handed the kumiss to Hoelun.

  “What brings you to us?” Orbey asked.

  “I seek your counsel,” Hoelun replied. “I am young. I have been a wife for only a season, and lack the wisdom of others.” She was silent for a moment. “I know that you helped to guide your people after your husband was so shamefully betrayed. I fear that my husband is forgetting what is owed to you, but please believe that his only wish is that his followers remain united against their enemies.”

  Orbey gestured with one callused hand. “My son could have brought us victory. He might have been Khan now, but the Noyans had to choose Khutula, and your husband's father was one of those
who brought the men to that choice. Bartan Bahadur wasn't thinking of who would be the better leader, only of seeing his brother as Khan.” She set down her sewing. “Men so often believe that one who has large appetites and who brags of his prowess will make a leader. They had to choose Khutula, and because of him, the Tatars and the Kin crushed us, and my son was one who died at their hands.”

  “I grieve for you, Khatun,” Hoelun said. “Yet I've been told that your husband himself, in his last message, asked his men to choose between Khutula and your son.”

  “Even Ambaghai Khan could be deceived, and see Khutula as more than he was. My son might have been Khan.”

  “My husband can bring you victory,” Hoelun said.

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “He might benefit from your advice.”

  Orbey showed her teeth; despite her age, she still had them all. “He does not seek my counsel.”

  “I can seek it,” Hoelun said, “and offer it to him. When he praises my wisdom, I can tell him that you guided me. I can see that he grants you every honour you are owed.”

  The two dowagers were silent.

  “Our bonds must be strong,” she continued, “if you are to have your revenge against those who robbed you of your husband and son. I only want to do what I can to strengthen those bonds.”

  Orbey glanced at Sokhatai, then turned to Hoelun. “I want my husband avenged,” she said in a low voice. “I want to see the heads of his enemies struck from their bodies and their blood staining the ground. I want to hear their children weep when they become our slaves. If Yesugei Bahadur gives me what I want, I can put my doubts aside.”

  “He will succeed.”

  “And if the Bahadur wins more glory for himself,” Sokhatai muttered, “then you won't have to hope another man will claim you.”

  Hoelun lifted her head. “Honourable Khatun, that isn't talk to be spread. It will only anger my husband.” She stared into Sokhatai's glassy eyes until the other woman turned away.