The World полностью

Calling themselves the Peoples Who Dwelt in Felt Tents, their homes were the gers, tents mounted on hulking carriages pulled by oxen that could be placed together like a wheeled town. Their horsemen – ‘the peasantry in military dress’ – could gallop sixty miles a day at top speed and survive long periods in the saddle, living on milk, dried marmot meat or the blood of their horses, and they also dried milk that could be mixed with water to make a nutritious drink. Each carried two composite bows, a curved sword, an axe, a mace, a lance and a lasso. They trained for war in the nerge or hunt, pursuing antelope and martens often with the aid of a falcon. Marmots – groundhogs – were a staple, used for fresh food that could be dried for winter and as a source of fur. But these animals, or rather the fleas that lived in their fur, would play a special role in world history. All these delicacies were drunk with lashings of kumis.^* Alcohol was the Mongols’ Achilles heel: they were boozers, and three of Genghis’s sons would die of alcoholism.

Eclectic in their beliefs, they revered Tengri (meaning Blue Heaven), worshipped on sacred mountains and in river springs, and relied on shamans to interpret auspices. But the steppe peoples respected other gods: around 1000, a rival tribe, the Keraits, converted to Nestorian Christianity.^*

In 1146, after ruling for fifteen years, Khabul died, succeeded by his son Ambagai Khan. In 1161, Ambagai was captured by a rival tribe, the Tatars, who handed him over to the Jurchen. ‘Avenge me’ was the message Ambagai sent to his brother Kutula, a man whose ‘voice resounded like thunder, with hands like bear paws that could snap a man in two like an arrow’, and who on ‘winter nights slept naked by a fire’. But Kutula too was captured and the Jurchen placed the two khans on to a gruesome torture machine called a wooden donkey. There ended the short Mongol khanate.

THE FALL OF TEMUJIN

The family fell on such desperate times that Yesugei, grandson of Khabul, was no longer a khan, just a baghatur. Riding across the steppe, he encountered a carriage pulled by yaks, the equipage of an Olqunnut girl called Hoelun, newly married to a Merkit, whom he kidnapped and married in turn, having four children with her. The first, born in 1162 just after the downfall, was Temujin (Ironsmith) – ‘born holding in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knuckle’.^*

When Temujin was about nine, his father selected a wife, Börte, for him and by tradition left him at her father’s camp. Riding home, Yesugei accepted hospitality from old enemies, members of the Tatar tribe, who poisoned him. Yesugei died three days later after telling the son of a family ally, Munglig, to get Temujin back – to defend a family that was still in catastrophic freefall.

Their herds were stolen, the children almost starving. ‘We have no friends other than our shadows,’ they said. Temujin argued with Bekter, a half-brother, about a stolen fish; then, together with his brother Qasar, shot him with their bows. Their mother raged at them, ‘You destroyers, like a wild dog eating its own afterbirth!’ A rival chieftain decided to liquidate Temujin; he was captured, locked into a cangue – neck fetter – and destined for slavery, but he escaped and went into hiding. He became anda – blood brothers – with Jamuqa, another ambitious boy, but both were masterful characters and they soon argued. Soon afterwards, thieves stole the family’s horses, and Temujin, aided by a boy named Boorchu, later one of his companions, got them back. Later he met another family who offered their son Jelme as his sidekick.

There was something about Temujin: ‘He has fire in his eyes, light in his face.’ He never forgot a friend but nor did he forget a slight, repeating like a mantra his determination in ‘avenging the avengement; requiting the requital’. Now he arrived at the ordu – court, (origin of the word horde) – of Toghril, khan of the Christian Keraits, once his father’s anda. Accepting the gift of a black sable coat, Toghril appointed Temujin chieftain of his Borjigin clan. Afterwards, Temujin’s wife Börte was kidnapped by the Merkit tribe in revenge for the stealing of his mother Hoelun twenty years earlier.

Temujin sent Boorchu and Jelme to track the Merkits while he retreated to Burkhan Khaldun, where he meditatively recalled, ‘When my life was worth no more than a louse, I escaped. Spared only my life and a horse, walking the paths of elk, making a home with a tent of willow.’ Temujin sacrificed to Tengri and ‘hung the belt over his shoulder and, kneeling nine times towards the sun, offered a sprinkling of kumis and prayer’. Telling his family, ‘I was protected,’ he believed he had been spared and chosen by Tengri. Yet his ambitions must have seemed delusional. It seemed unlikely the world would ever hear of Temujin again.

TAMARA, CHAMPION OF THE MESSIAH