At last Jamukha sent out a tendril of thought, then realized that the shaman could not now hear him. Teb-Tenggeri, as did most shamans, endured moments when he would fall to the ground senseless, or else start to twist in one of the fits that he could not control, whenever certain spirits had possession of him. Perhaps Teb-Tenggeri had lost consciousness; maybe his spirit had left his body temporarily.
Jamukha waited for the shaman to come to himself, then felt the man’s body stir.
He would leave this place, Teb-Tenggeri was thinking, and ride to his Khan. Jamukha sensed the shaman’s intention before the darkness, as thick as heavy felt, cloaked him once more.
Jamukha and Temujin were enemies long before Teb-Tenggeri had become the Khan’s chief shaman, but Teb-Tenggeri’s reputation had quickly grown among the tribes. The shaman had come to his calling early, while still a boy called Kokochu. He had told his father Munglik, a Khongkhotat chief who had chosen to follow Jamukha, that a dream had shown him that Munglik should ride to Temujin’s side. Munglik had been amply rewarded for heeding that omen and deserting Jamukha; Temujin had welcomed him as an old friend and given the Khongkhotat his own widowed mother as a wife.
Kokochu, as a trusted stepbrother of the young Mongol Khan, had quickly won fame as a mighty shaman whose spells were greatly feared by Temujin’s enemies. He could raise the wind, and sweep enemy horsemen from their mounts. He cast spells that protected the Mongol forces from enemy arrows. He would stand fearlessly in the open as lightning struck the ground around him, and turn a storm of ice and hail against enemy forces. It was said that he often rode to Heaven on his white horse, and that the spirits themselves had given him the name of Teb-Tenggeri, the All-Celestial.
Jamukha had once scorned and mocked such tales. Now, imprisoned inside Teb-Tenggeri, blind and helpless, he no longer doubted them.
The shaman was speaking in his musical voice. Jamukha did not know how much time had passed, how long he had been waiting in the darkness, and then he heard the familiar and once-beloved voice of another man.
Temujin, he thought, straining to hear his anda’s words. Teb-Tenggeri must have ridden to the Khan’s camp; he was addressing Temujin now. Jamukha was suddenly afraid.
“I must speak to you,” Teb-Tenggeri was saying, and then spears of light pierced the darkness around Jamukha, making the world visible again. He gazed through the shaman’s eyes and felt Teb-Tenggeri’s body around him.
Another man sat on a cushion across from Teb-Tenggeri. The man stretched his arms toward the fire that glowed inside the curved metal bands of the hearth; the light caught his face, and Jamukha felt sharp pangs of grief and regret as he recognized Temujin. His anda’s strange pale eyes were the same, his mustaches as long, and the dark braids coiled behind his ears on his shaven head still had their reddish tint, but there was weariness in Temujin’s leathery aging face.
“What is it?” Temujin asked. “What do you wish to tell me,” and Jamukha, moved by the familiar sound of that quiet but forceful voice, nearly called out his sworn brother’s name.
“I am with you again,” Teb-Tenggeri said, but Jamukha was also saying those words, hearing his own voice in that of the shaman’s. “I speak to you now through your shaman Teb-Tenggeri.”
Temujin’s eyes widened as he held up his hand, palm out, and made a sign against evil.
“You wanted me at your side,” the shaman continued with Jamukha’s voice, “even as you ordered my death, and I have not forgotten my promise to you.”
Temujin clutched at the shaman’s arm, and Jamukha felt his old comrade’s strong grip. “Can it be?”
Jamukha longed to tell the Khan of how his spirit had been wandering ever since his death, of how he had not forgotten his oath to watch over him. Then the pain of all the betrayals stabbed at him again. You ordered my death, Temujin. You said that you could not allow me to live, and now, when it is too late, you mourn me and long for me and indulge yourself in regret. Jamukha was about to utter a curse when he felt the words catch in the shaman’s throat.
Teb-Tenggeri could still rein him in, could bury him again in the suffocating darkness if he resisted the shaman’s will. Teb-Tenggeri could trap him and see that he never escaped.
“I promised to watch over you,” Jamukha said through the shaman, “and I am here. You longed for me to be your comrade once more, and I have come to you.”
“Jamukha!” Temujin cried.
Teb-Tenggeri held out his hands as Temujin sagged against him, then closed his arms around him. “I am with you again, Temujin, as you wished me to be.”
Temujin clung to Teb-Tenggeri, his fingers digging into the shaman’s coat. “You were my first true friend as a boy, Jamukha,” Temujin said softly, “as close to me as my own brothers. You were my friend when I had no one, when my father was murdered and my family abandoned by all. I didn’t want to leave your side, I never wanted to fight against you, I did not want to order your death. There were so many times when I was ready to forgive you.”
Temujin wanted to believe that, Jamukha thought. It was a weakness of Temujin’s, perhaps his only weakness, the way in which he often hesitated before deciding on what he must do. He was always one to seek counsel from those closest to him – his mother Hoelun, his brother Khasar, his close comrade Borchu, and his chief wife Bortai, who had done everything in her power to turn Temujin against Jamukha. The Khan would listen to their advice, and weigh it, but in the end he always overcame his doubts and did only as he wished to do. However much Temujin might falter making his decisions in the beginning, in the end he was always implacable in the service of his own will. Then he would delude himself into believing that he had been forced only by necessity and the will of the spirits to act in his own interests.
“I have forgiven you.” The shaman was still speaking with Jamukha’s voice. “I am here to honor my oath to you. When you wish to have me with you again, you need only summon your shaman to your side.”
“Jamukha.” Temujin held on to Teb-Tenggeri’s coat, and Jamukha glimpsed tears in the Khan’s gold-flecked greenish-brown eyes. Temujin would never have shown such weakness in front of any of his men. Jamukha should have felt triumphant, seeing his betrayer in such a state; instead, pity pricked at him.
“Promise me that you won’t leave me,” the Khan murmured, “that your spirit will always watch over me.”
“I shall,” Teb-Tenggeri said with Jamukha’s voice. “Be at peace, my brother.” Then Jamukha was again plunged into darkness.
Jamukha waited, curled in on himself, buried in the darkness he could not escape. Once, unable to bear the thick gloom any longer, he found himself pushing against it, sinking more deeply into the blackness even as he struggled to free himself.
“You cannot get away.” Teb-Tenggeri’s voice surrounded him. “There is no way out for you until I choose to let you go. Right now, I need you if I am to strengthen my hold on Temujin. He will heed my words above anyone else’s because he hears your voice in me, because he knows that your spirit truly lives inside me. When I have seen more deeply into your soul, when I have finally learned everything that has passed between you and Temujin, when I know enough to make my Khan believe that you still possess me even when you do not – then I can show you some mercy and release you.”
“I’m grateful for that,” Jamukha murmured, wondering if he could trust the shaman. He held his doubts close, cloaking them, knowing that he had to keep his deepest thoughts hidden.
“It seems,” the shaman said, “that you have some doubts about my ambitions.”
The man was too sensitive to his innermost thoughts. Jamukha reined in his doubts. “I am only thinking,” he said, “that as trusted as you are by the Khan, and as much as Temujin fears your powers and your spells, you are not the only one who advises him. He also listens to his brothers and to his comrades in arms – Borchu, Jelme, Mukhali and the rest. Temujin has always had so many trusted followers.” He struggled against his bitterness, then allowed Teb-Tenggeri to sense
it. “I also suspect that his chief wife Bortai still has his ear.”
“Bortai Khatun is too frightened of me even to think of poisoning her husband against me. As for his brothers, Temujin has only to suspect that one or more of them covets his throne, and that would be enough to make him turn against them.”
Could that be true? Could Khasar or Temuge even dream of ruling in their older brother’s place? Jamukha did not believe it; the two had been deeply devoted to Temujin ever since boyhood, and had remained loyal even when the Khan had suffered his worst defeats. Could Teb-Tenggeri rouse the Khan’s suspicions against his brothers? That might be a kind of revenge, seeing Temujin harden himself against those who were most faithful to him and to doubt the loyalty of those he loved most.
Jamukha should have felt a fierce joy at that prospect. Instead, he was remembering a time when he and Temujin, as boys, had practiced together with their bows. Khasar had joined them on the windswept plain of yellow grass, aiming his arrows at a distant tree, never missing, proving that he was the best archer among them. It had been easy for Jamukha to praise Khasar for his skill, to feel joy at the pride he saw in the younger boy’s sharp dark eyes. For that moment, on that day, the three of them had been happy, oblivious of their enemies and all of the hardships that still lay ahead.
The memory left him, captured in the web of Teb-Tenggeri’s thoughts. The shaman would find a way to use it to play on Temujin’s regrets. Jamukha wondered why he did not feel happier about that prospect, then quickly cloaked his feelings in the thick darkness.
Embedded as he was in the blackness, unable to see or to hear, Jamukha found himself recalling the sights and sounds of the past.
He was in the northern forests, waiting with his men to raid an encampment of mushroom-shaped yurts along the Uda River. He had ridden there to aid Temujin, whose young wife Bortai was a prisoner in that Merkit camp. Far above him, bright veils of light fluttered in the night sky; the spirits who danced at the Gate of Heaven were urging him on to victory.
Now he was standing with Temujin under the great tree in the Khorkhonagh Valley as hundreds of men swore oaths to them both, raising a forest of lances and stamping their feet.
Then he was lying with Temujin under that tree, listening to the distant howl of wolves, gazing up through the leaves at the tiny bright smokeholes of Tengri that dotted the night sky. They had shared themselves with each other under the blanket, giving themselves pleasure with their hands as they had when they were boys, but now they were men, binding themselves to each other more tightly, being to each other what no one else could be to either of them.
That love had been their secret. Others had seen them only as the closest of comrades and sworn brothers, and Jamukha was content to leave it so, feeling that such secrecy kept their love unsullied. No mockery would wound them; no puzzled, suspicious looks from Bortai or Temujin’s other women could touch them. Nothing would sever the secret bond that bound them.
But that bond had been cut, and the love they had once shared had made their parting angry and bitter. The urges of his body, the desires that made him long for Temujin, became only more weapons the spirits had used to strike at him, tormenting him with what he had lost. His rage had turned his love to hatred, lashing him into his doomed battles against his anda.
Most of his thoughts now were of the times before he and Temujin had parted so bitterly, before they had fought their wars against each other. Allowing himself to think of the betrayals and the wars only brought pain. There had been times when Temujin had been ready to forgive him, when Jamukha had wanted to reach out to his once-beloved friend to say that he was willing to forget the past, but always the anger and hatred and bitterness had come between them again.
From time to time, light and sound would flood into him, and Jamukha would observe the world through Teb-Tenggeri’s eyes. Usually, the shaman was inside his yurt, sitting on silk cushions amid the chests of treasures that had been given to him in return for his spells. Temujin was always with them, trembling as he reminisced with Jamukha, laughing or weeping over the past, striking his chest with a fist as he spoke of his regrets, gripping Teb-Tenggeri by the shoulders as he begged again for Jamukha’s forgiveness.
“Once, the spirits spoke to me,” Temujin would say, “and then they grew silent. Once my dreams were clear, and then I saw them only through a mist. An evil in me has made me doubt the truth of the spirits, but now I hear the ghost of my anda, and know that I was wrong to doubt. Forgive me, Jamukha.”
Always the response was the same. “I forgive you,” Teb-Tenggeri would say with Jamukha’s voice, and then the shaman would offer his own advice to the Khan, speaking of what his dreams had told him.
The Khan should make another foray across the Gobi against the Tanguts in the south; the spirits had promised Teb-Tenggeri that there would be much plunder for his men to share.
Toghar, Teb-Tenggeri’s cousin, had proven his loyalty to the Khan and deserved to be rewarded with five hundred retainers and their households.
Hoelun Khatun, the Khan’s old mother and Teb-Tenggeri’s stepmother, might once have been wise, but she had grown more feeble in both body and mind and her advice could no longer be trusted. Such were the slow poisons Teb-Tenggeri fed to Temujin with his advice.
Temujin was willing to believe the shaman’s words, because through him, his comrade Jamukha lived again. Jamukha would listen as Temujin gave the orders that granted honors to those who were loyal to Teb-Tenggeri and also withheld favors from any whom the shaman doubted. The Khan was clearly ready to do anything to keep the ghost of his old friend near him, fearing to lose Jamukha again.
Yet when the darkness enclosed him once more, cutting him off from the world, Jamukha found himself thinking of how little joy there seemed to be in seeing Temujin give vent to his regrets, in watching the shaman play on the Khan’s fears and remorse. His soul’s imprisonment inside Teb-Tenggeri had finally burned the fire of his old rages into ashes.
It was Teb-Tenggeri’s wish that Temujin hold a kuriltai, and once again be proclaimed Khan. The bones and the stars had revealed that it was Heaven’s will that Temujin be once more confirmed as Genghis Khan, now that all the tribes had submitted to him.
The shaman had allowed Jamukha to gaze through his eyes as he read the bones, to listen as Teb-Tenggeri told Temujin of the ceremony that would mark his greatness. He had even let Jamukha’s spirit fly from him for a time, to soar above the steppe and look down at the chiefs and Noyans in their lacquered leather armor as they rode toward the Khan’s great pavilion. But Jamukha felt the invisible, strong tether that still bound him to Teb-Tenggeri. A longing for freedom came over him, but the tether drew taut, pulling him back to the shaman.
Other shamans performed the horse sacrifice, strangling a white steed and burning its flesh in a pit to the right of the pavilion. Temujin’s brothers and close comrades raised him on a carpet of felt and carried him to his throne. But it was Teb-Tenggeri who hoisted the Khan’s tugh, a standard of nine white yak tails on a long pole, and again proclaimed Temujin as Genghis Khan.
Temujin’s favorite wives sat with Bortai to the Khan’s left, their high square birch headdresses adorned with feathers and jewels. The men seated at Temujin’s right lifted their goblets of kumiss and airagh as they hailed their Khan. Jamukha fed on the smoke of burning meat and the drops of fermented mare’s milk that the men spilled from their cups as offerings to the spirits.
Perhaps Teb-Tenggeri was granting Jamukha this unaccustomed freedom in order to stoke his rage against Temujin. He was allowing him to see his old comrade at the height of his glory, with all the tribes honoring him, knowing the sight would feed Jamukha’s anger. It no longer mattered what the tribes called themselves, Kereits or Merkits, Onggirats, Naimans or Ongghuts; they were all Mongols now, and the man who had united them and made an army of them would hurl them against the world.
It should have been a bitter sight for Jamukha, yet he found himself pitying his frie
nd. Temujin’s face revealed his weariness, and his pale eyes were cold as he recited the laws that would now govern his people.
He is mourning me still, Jamukha realized. During all of the times that Jamukha had spoken to the Khan through Teb-Tenggeri, Temujin had murmured of their old bond, his loneliness, his increasing isolation. He could trust fewer and fewer of those closest to him; he claimed to need Jamukha even more now. That was, Jamukha supposed, part of his revenge, knowing that Temujin was becoming weaker and more suspicious of others.
Teb-Tenggeri quickly drew Jamukha inside himself and wrapped him in darkness again. Jamukha had glimpsed some of the shaman’s thoughts – his lust for power, his arrogance, his growing belief that he was destined to rule through the Khan whom the spirits favored.
But that was not the will of the spirits, to have Teb-Tenggeri rule. Jamukha was convinced of that truth. He had read the bones that morning through the shaman’s eyes, had seen the burnt clavicles crack down the middle. The omen had been clear, that God favored Temujin; Koko Mongke Tengri, the Eternal Blue Heaven above, had chosen Temujin to rule over the world.
Perhaps that was why Jamukha had been left to wander the land of the living, why he had been set out for Teb-Tenggeri like small game for a hawk; the spirits needed him to fulfill their ends. It came to Jamukha that he would not be free to fly to Heaven, to ride and hunt with the other spirits of the dead, until he carried out Heaven’s will and preserved Temujin’s throne from Teb-Tenggeri.
But what could he do? How could he act against the man who kept his soul imprisoned, who could read his thoughts if Jamukha grew careless in hiding them?
He had no power to stand against Teb-Tenggeri, but there might be a way to turn Temujin against him. Perhaps he had to urge the shaman more forcefully along the trail he already intended to follow. Teb-Tenggeri had been patient and cautious so far in his demands, but Jamukha might be able to goad the shaman into overreaching himself and thus rouse Temujin’s anger.
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