Kublai looked away from the older man. There would be no comfort from him, no attempt to make it easier. Uriang-Khadai had never offered him the weak way and he respected him for it, as much as it hurt. Kublai nodded.
‘Yes. Not public, Uriang-Khadai. Not for my brother. Put aside your anger if you honour me and make his death quick and clean, as much as it can be.’ His voice grew rough as he spoke the last words.
‘And the body, my lord?’
‘He was khan, orlok. Give him a funeral pyre to light up the sky. Let the nation mourn his passing if they will. None of that matters. He is my brother, Uriang-Khadai. Just … make it quick.’
The summer sun was warm on the back of his neck as Kublai sat in the gardens of the palace, his son Zhenjin beside him. In the distance, a black plume of smoke rose into the sky, but Kublai had not wanted to stand and watch his brother’s funeral. Instead, he rested with closed eyes, taking simple pleasure in his son’s company.
‘I will be going on to Xanadu in a few days,’ Kublai said. ‘You’ll see your mother again there.’
‘I’m glad I had the chance to see this city first,’ Zhenjin replied. ‘It is so full of history.’
Kublai smiled. ‘It isn’t history to me, boy. It’s my family and I miss them all. I rode with Genghis when I was younger than you, barely able to stay on a saddle.’
‘What was he like?’ Zhenjin asked.
Kublai opened his eyes to find his son watching him.
‘He was a man who loved his children and his people, Zhenjin. He took the Chin foot off the throat of the nation and made us look up from the struggles of tribes. He changed the world.’
Zhenjin looked down, playing with a cherry twig in his hands, bending it this way and that.
‘I would like to change the world,’ he said.
Kublai smiled, with just an edge of sadness in his eyes.
‘You will, my son, you will. But no one can change it for ever.’
HISTORICAL NOTE
There are few surviving details of Guyuk’s khanate. It is true that he brought an army to attack Batu in his own lands, after Batu failed to give his oath at a quiriltai, or gathering. We know that Batu was warned by Sorhatani and then Guyuk died in a manner unknown, with the armies in sight of each other. People do just die at times, obviously, but as with the death of Genghis’ son Jochi, some endings are a little too fortuitous to believe the official record. I should add that there is no evidence that Guyuk was homosexual. I needed to explain how he fell out with Batu on the return from Russia - a detail missing from the historical record. As he was khan for only two years and died conveniently early, I was thinking of him as a similar character to England’s Edward II, who was homosexual. The development came naturally. Guyuk achieved nothing of note.
Guyuk’s death cleared the way for Mongke to become khan, beginning a conflict within the Mongol nation as the forces of modernisation, as represented by Chin influence, struggled against traditional Mongol culture and outlook. Mongke was supported by Batu, who owed Sorhatani his life.
Mongke was about thirty-six when he became khan, strong and fit, with good years ahead of him. It is true that he began his reign with a gathering at Avraga, then a slaughter of the opposition as he cleared house, including Guyuk’s wife, Oghul Khaimish. She was accused of sorcery.
Mongke began his khanate with a push outwards, reestablishing the Mongol war machine in all directions. He ruled from 1251 to 1259, eight years of expansion and slaughter. His brother Hulegu went west to crush the Islamic world, while at Mongke’s order, Kublai was sent east and south into Sung China. Their mother Sorhatani died in 1252, more than seventy years old. In her life, she had ruled Mongolia in her own right and seen her eldest son become khan. A Nestorian Christian herself, she had her sons taught Buddhism and established mosques and madrasa schools in Islamic regions. For the breadth of her imagination and reach, she was simply the most extraordinary woman of her era. It is a pleasure of historical fiction that I sometimes come across people who deserve books all to themselves - Julius Caesar’s uncle Marius was one. Sorhatani is another. I have almost certainly not done justice to her.
If it had not actually happened, a fictional account of Kublai’s attack on Sung lands would be ludicrous. He had no experience in battle and had lived a mostly scholarly life. At that time, just one city in Sung territory held more people than the entire Mongol nation. It was, to put it lightly, an immense task, even for a grandson of Genghis. As a side note, home-made sheepskin rafts of the sort I have described were used by Kublai and are still used today to cross rivers in China.
Mongke did give Kublai experienced generals. For plot reasons in previous books, I wrote Tsubodai as childless. In fact, Uriang-Khadai was Tsubodai’s son and a renowned general in his own right. Mongke gave Kublai the best for his first campaign, as well as a minor first objective that he could accomplish with ease. There again, Genghis showed the way. As Genghis had attacked the Xi Xia kingdom first, to establish a back door into Chin territory, Mongke saw the Yunnan region with its single city of Ta-li as the way in to the Sung. Kublai’s army would have been outnumbered, but that would not have been too worrying. They were always outnumbered. It is interesting to note that the popular idea of a Mongol horde overwhelming smaller armies is almost completely false.
Mongke offered Kublai a choice of two vast estates in China. In the history, Kublai had time to ask Yao Shu for advice and the old man recommended Ching-chao in the north as it had rich soil. In time, Kublai would establish thousands of farms there that produced a vast fortune and led to trouble with his brother over his income. It was on those lands that he began his ‘Upper Capital’, known as Shang-du, or in the more common English form, Xanadu. It may not have had a ‘pleasure dome’, as in the poem by Samuel Coleridge, but it did have an immense deer park within its walls, where Kublai could hunt.
The Assassin fortress in Alamut came under attack by Hulegu’s forces around 1256. The head of the Muslim sect that held the fortress of Alamut was, in fact, Ala Ad-Din. I avoided his true name because of the similarity to ‘Aladdin’ and because I’d used one too similar in a previous book. Here I have used Suleiman. The Ismaili Shia Muslim Assassins were extremely powerful in the region at this time, with at least four major fortresses, though Alamut was the strongest, an impregnable eyrie in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea. Interestingly, the storyline around Hasan and the leader comes from the record of the Mongols written by Ata al-Mulk Juvaini, a Persian writer and historian who accompanied Hulegu both to Alamut and Baghdad, later becoming governor of that defeated city. We do not know it was Hasan who murdered his master, but he seems the most likely candidate. Hasan had been tortured over years for amusement, even to the point of being abused with his wife in the bedchamber. It is one of those interesting events in history that the leader of the Assassins was killed at exactly the wrong moment, making Hulegu’s task simple. The Assassins were compelled to surrender and their new leader, Rukn-al-Din, was kicked to death on Hulegu’s orders - a great honour from the Mongol point of view as it did not shed blood and therefore recognised his status as leader of the sect.
The fall of Baghdad to Hulegu is one of the most shocking slaughters ever to occur in the line of Genghis. Hulegu did insist on disarming the city, then went on to butcher at least 800,000 of the million population. The Tigris is said to have run red with the blood of scholars. The caliph was allowed to choose 100 of his 700 harem women to save, then Hulegu had him killed and the women were added to Hulegu’s gers.
I have tried to contrast Hulegu with Kublai, as they had such differing styles. In many ways, Hulegu struggled to be like Mongke and Genghis, while Kublai became as Chinese as the most tradition-bound Chin lord - and greater. Baghdad was ransacked and looted, as Hulegu seems to have had a greed for gold that Genghis would never have understood. In comparison, it is true that Kublai spared cities if they surrendered, making it a central part of his style. He forbade his men indiscriminate killing
of the Chin and Sung, on pain of their own execution if they disobeyed him. His character must be set against the traditional ruthlessness of his culture to understand what an unusual man he was. He was certainly influenced in that by Yao Shu, a man still revered in China for his Buddhist principles and the lives he saved.
Mongke still felt the need to join the Sung attack on a different front in the end. One source puts the size of the army he brought into Sung lands as sixty tumans - a true horde of 600,000 men, though a smaller figure is much more likely. Enemies of the khans always had trouble estimating Mongol army sizes because of the vast herd of remounts they kept with them. We do not know if Kublai had stalled, or whether Mongke had always agreed with his brother that a two-pronged attack would be necessary to unite the Chinese empires.
The manner of Mongke’s death en route to Sung China is disputed. It was either an arrow wound that became infected, or dysentery, or cholera: such a wide range of possibilities that it allowed me to work with the idea that Hulegu’s attack on the Assassins could well have earned their final vengeance. Kublai knew he had to pull back when the news reached him of the death of Mongke. It was an established tradition, and even Tsubodai’s conquest of western Europe had been abandoned on the death of Ogedai. The Sung generals would have heard almost as soon as Kublai himself and their relief can only be imagined. Yet Kublai refused to leave China. He had already begun to divorce himself from the politics of home. China was his khanate, his empire, even then.
Mongke’s army had no such reluctance and immediately abandoned their progress south in Sung lands. When Hulegu heard the news, he too returned from the Middle East, loyal to the end. He left only some twenty thousand men under General Kitbuqa (who did indeed insist on holding Christian Mass in conquered mosques). Without the other tumans in support, they were destroyed by resurgent Muslim forces, using, of all tactics, the feigned retreat so beloved by Mongol armies. However, Hulegu had won his own khanate, which eventually became modern-day Iran. Only Kublai ignored the call.
At home in Karakorum, Arik-Boke made a decision that would affect all the generations of his family to come. He had ruled the capital in Mongke’s absence and was already established as the khan of the homeland. With the return of Mongke’s army, he convinced himself there was no better candidate and declared himself great khan. The youngest son of Sorhatani and Tolui had come to rule.
In the same year, 1260, his brother Kublai declared himself khan while standing on foreign soil. Kublai could not have known that he was sowing the seeds of a civil war between brothers that would bring the empire of Genghis to its knees.
I have altered the order of Sung emperors rather than omit scenes with the boy emperor, Huaizong, who ruled slightly later in the period. Emperor Lizong had reigned for some forty years when he finally died childless in 1264. He was succeeded by his nephew, Emperor Duzong, a man of immense appetites. He lasted only ten years until 1274 and was succeeded by his eight-year-old younger brother, who in turn would survive only four years and see Kublai’s triumph over his house.
On the subject of numbers: fourteen is extremely unlucky in Chinese culture, as the sound is similar to the words for ‘want to die’ in both Cantonese and Mandarin. Nine, as the greatest single integer, is one of the luckiest numbers and is associated with the emperor.
By this time, there were simply too many princes to include them all. Lord Alghu was son to Baidur, grandson to Chagatai, great-grandson to Genghis. He ruled the Chagatai khanate and initially supported Arik-Boke in the civil war before turning against him. It is true that he was the first of his line to convert to Islam, a fairly sound tactical move given the people he ruled in the khanate around Samarkand and Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan. A century after these events, Samarkand would become the capital of the conqueror Tamerlane.
The answer Arik-Boke gave to his brother, ‘I was in the right and now you are,’ is part of the historical record and fascinating for what it reveals of the man. Like Guyuk Khan before him, Arik-Boke’s death remains one of those oddly convenient occurrences in history. He was in the prime of his life, healthy and strong, yet shortly after losing to Kublai, he dies. It is not difficult to suspect foul play.
When I began this series, I intended to write all of Kublai Khan’s life. The most famous events - meeting Marco Polo, both attacks on Japan - seemed like vital parts of the story. Yet it is a truth of historical fiction that all the characters are long dead; all the lives and stories have ended, and usually not well. Very few lives finish in glory and I have already written the deaths of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. For once, I thought I might finish a series with a character still alive and with all his dreams and hopes still to come. I might know that Kublai’s wife and son died before him, leaving him a broken man given to drinking and eating far too much, but at this point in his life, he does not - and that is how I wanted to leave him.
There will always be loose ends with such a decision. Kublai defeated the Sung at last and established the Yuan dynasty of a united China, a name still used for the currency today. His descendants ruled for almost a hundred years before fading into history, though the bloodline of Genghis ruled other khanates for far longer.
This story began with a single, starving family, hunted and alone on the plains of Mongolia - and ends with Kublai Khan ruling an empire larger than that of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Over just three generations, that is the simply the greatest rags-to-riches tale in human history.
Conn Iggulden
London, 2011
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Airag/Black airag
Clear alcohol, distilled from mare’s milk.
Arban
Small, raiding group, usually ten men.
Bondsmen
Warriors sworn to personal service, guards to a khan.
Chuh!
Phonetic representation of the Mongol horse command for speed.
Deel
Lightly padded full-length robe with wide sleeves, tied at the waist.
Earth Mother
Earth spirit, partner to the Sky Father.
Gers
Circular homes of felt and wicker lattice, sometimes mistakenly called yurts.
Guest rights
The offer of temporary protection or truce while in a man’s home.
Gur-khan/Great Khan
Khan of khans, leader of the nation.
Jagun
Military unit of a hundred men.
Khan
Tribal leader. No ‘k’ sound in Mongolian, so pronounced: ‘Haan’.
Minghaan
Military unit of a thousand.
Nokhoi Khor!
Pronounced: ‘Ner-hoy, Hor.’ Literally: ‘Hold the Dog!’ - a greeting when approaching strangers.
Orlok
Overall commander of a Mongol army.
Quiriltai
A gathering of princes for the purpose of electing a new khan.
Shaman
Medicine man in a tribe, both a healer and one who communes with spirits.
Sky Father
Sometimes called Tengri. Mongol deity, partner to the Earth Mother.
Tuman
Unit of ten thousand.
Yam stations
Stops for fast scouts to change horses, twenty-five miles apart.
INDEX OF CHARACTERS
Ala-ud-Din Mohammed
Shah of Khwarezm. Died exhausted on an island in the Caspian Sea.
Alkhun
Senior officer of the khan’s guards in Karakorum.
Arslan
Master swordsmith who was once armourer to the Naiman tribe. Father to Jelme. Died of disease in Samarkand.
Baabgai
The bear. A Chin recruit who becomes a successful wrestler.
Baidur
Son of Chagatai. Rules his father’s khanate around modern day Afghanistan.
Barchuk
Khan of the Uighurs.
Basan
Wolf tribe. Bondsman o
f Yesugei in Wolf of the Plains.
Batu
Son to Jochi and grandson to Genghis Khan. Leads a tuman with Tsubodai and becomes a lord with vast lands in Russia.
Bayar
General to Kublai.
Bekter
Oldest son of Yesugei and Hoelun. Murdered by his brothers.
Bela IV
King of Hungary at the time Tsubodai’s tumans attacked.
Borte
Olkhun’ut tribe. Daughter to Sholoi and Shria. Becomes wife to Temujin/Genghis and has four sons: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedai and Tolui.
Chagatai
Old storyteller in Wolf tribe.
Chagatai
Same name as storyteller. Second son of Genghis and Borte. Father to Baidur.
Chakahai
Daughter to Rai Chiang of the Xi Xia. A princess given as tribute. Second wife to Genghis.
Chen Yi
Criminal gang leader in Chin city of Baotou.
Chulgetei
General of a tuman under Tsubodai.
Conrad Von Thuringen
Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights.
Eeluk
Bondsman to Yesugei Khan. Becomes khan of the Wolves on Yesugei’s death.
Enq
Olkhun’ut tribe. Father to Koke. Brother to Hoelun. Uncle to Temujin/Genghis and his siblings.
Genghis Khan (see also Temujin)
First khan of the Mongol nation. Husband to Borte. Father to Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedai and Tolui. Dies in Bones of the Hills.
Guyuk
Son of Ogedai Khan and Torogene.
Hasan
Brutalised servant in assassin fortress of Alamut.
Ho Sa
Officer of the Xi Xia. Becomes envoy and officer under Genghis. Dies in Bones of the Hills.
Hoelun
Wife of Yesugei. Mother to Bekter, Temujin, Kachiun, Khasar, Temuge and Temulun.
Hulegu
Third son of Sorhatani and Tolui. Grandson of Genghis Khan.
Ilugei
General of a tuman under Tsubodai.
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