Ruin Chu’s mouth worked, though no sound came out.
Genghis stepped closer to him. “Go back to Yenking, Minister, and bring him out. If he is not here by noon, all the riches in the world will not save your city.”
Ruin Chu swallowed, visibly afraid. He had hoped that the Mongol khan would not ask to see a seven-year-old boy. Would little Xuan survive the meeting? Ruin Chu could not be sure. The Mongols were cruel and nothing was beneath them. Yet there was no choice and he bowed even deeper than before.
“Your will, my lord.”
As the sun rose in the sky, the great train of treasures was halted to allow the emperor’s litter out onto the plain. With him came a hundred men in armor, walking at the side of the box borne by matching slaves. They came in grim silence and the Mongols too fell quiet at the sight, beginning to drift in after the group as they made their way to where Genghis waited with his generals. No special tent had been raised for the emperor, yet Genghis could not help a twinge of awe as the ranks marched toward him. It was true that the boy had played no part in the history of the tribes. Yet he was the single symbol of everything they had come together to resist. Genghis dropped his hand to the hilt of one of Arslan’s swords at his waist. When it had been forged, he had been khan of less than fifty men in a camp of snow and ice. He would hardly have dared dream then that the emperor of the Chin would one day come at his command.
The litter shone in the sun as it was lowered with incredible gentleness. The slaves straightened from the poles, staring straight ahead. Genghis watched in fascination as small curtains were lifted aside by Ruin Chu and a small boy stepped onto the grass. He wore a long, jeweled green jacket over leggings of black. A high collar made the boy hold his head up. His eyes were not afraid as they met those of the khan, and Genghis felt a touch of admiration for the child’s courage.
Genghis took a step forward and sensed the hard gaze of the soldiers on him. “Have these men stand back, Ruin Chu,” he said softly.
The minister bowed his head and gave the order. Genghis stood stiffly as the officers glared at him before retreating a grudging distance. The idea that they could protect the little boy in the heart of the Mongol camp was ludicrous, but Genghis could feel the fierce loyalty in them. He did not want them startled into an attack. Once they had moved, he thought no more of their presence and approached the emperor.
“You are welcome in my camp,” he said in the Chin tongue. The little boy stared up at him without a reply and Genghis saw his hands were shaking.
“You have everything you wanted,” Xuan said suddenly, his voice high and brittle.
“I wanted an end to the siege,” Genghis replied. “This is one end.”
The boy raised his head even further, standing like a gleaming mannequin in the sun. “Will you attack us now?”
Genghis shook his head. “I have said my word is iron, little man. I think perhaps if your father stood before me now, I would consider it. There are many among my people who would applaud me for the strategy.” He paused to swallow against his itching throat and could not stop a hacking cough working its way loose. To his irritation, an audible wheeze remained as he continued.
“I have killed wolves. I will not hunt rabbits.”
“I will not always be so young, my lord khan,” the little boy replied. “You may regret leaving me alive.”
Genghis smiled at the show of precocious defiance, even as Ruin Chu winced. With a smooth movement, Genghis drew his sword and rested the tip on the boy’s shoulder, touching his collar.
“All great men have enemies, emperor. Yours will hear that you stood with my sword at your neck and not all the armies and cities of the Chin could remove the blade. In time, you will understand why that gives me more satisfaction than killing you ever could.” Another cough made his throat clench and he wiped his mouth with his free hand.
“I have offered you peace, boy. I cannot say I will not be back, or that my sons and their generals will not stand here in years to come. You have bought peace for a year, perhaps two or three. That is more than your people have ever given mine.” With a sigh, he sheathed the blade.
“There is one last thing, boy, before I go home to the lands of my childhood.”
“What more do you want?” Xuan replied. He had gone a sickly white now that the blade had been removed from his neck, but his eyes were cold.
“Kneel to me, emperor, and I will leave,” Genghis said. To his surprise, the boy’s eyes filled with furious tears.
“I will not!”
Ruin Chu came closer, hovering nervously at the emperor’s shoulder. “Son of Heaven, you must,” he whispered.
Genghis did not speak again, and at last, the boy’s shoulders slumped in defeat. He stared blindly as he knelt before the khan.
Genghis stood in the breeze and enjoyed a long moment of silence before he motioned to Ruin Chu to help the boy to his feet.
“Do not forget this day, emperor, when you are grown,” Genghis said, softly. The boy did not reply as Ruin Chu guided his steps back to the litter and saw him safely inside. The column formed up around it and began the march back to the city.
Genghis watched them go. The tribute was paid and his army waited for his order to move. Nothing more held him to the cursed plain that had brought weakness and frustration from the moment he set foot on it.
“Let us go home,” he said to Kachiun. Horns sounded across the plain and the vast host of his people began to move.
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The sickness in Genghis’s chest worsened in the first weeks of travel. His skin was hot to the touch and he sweated constantly, suffering from rashes at his groin and armpits, wherever there was hair to grow foul. His breath came painfully, so that he wheezed every night and could never clear his throat. He longed for the cool, clean winds of the mountains of home, and against reason, he spent every day in the saddle, looking to the horizon.
A month out from Yenking, the outskirts of the desert realm were in sight and the tribes halted by a river to take on water for the trip. It was there that the last of the scouts Genghis had left behind came riding into camp. Two of them did not join their friends around the campfires and instead rode straight to the khan’s ger on its cart.
Kachiun and Arslan were there with Genghis and all three men came out to hear the final report. They watched as the two scouts dismounted stiffly. Both were caked in dust and dirt and Genghis exchanged a glance with his brother, swallowing against a twitch of his tortured throat.
“My lord khan,” one of the scouts began. He swayed as he stood and Genghis wondered what could have made the man ride himself to exhaustion.
“The emperor has left Yenking, lord, heading south. More than a thousand went with him.”
“He ran?” Genghis demanded in disbelief.
“South, lord. The city was left open, abandoned behind him. I did not stay to see how many people survived inside. The emperor took many more carts and slaves, every one of his ministers.”
No one else spoke as they waited for Genghis to cough into a closed fist, straining for air.
“I gave him peace,” Genghis said at last. “Yet he shouts to the world that my word means nothing to him.”
“What does it matter, brother?” Kachiun began. “Khasar is in the south. No city would dare give sanctuary—”
Genghis silenced him with a furious gesture. “I will not go back to that place, Kachiun. But there is a price for all things. He has broken the peace I offered him to run to his armies in the south. Now you will show him the result.”
“Brother?” Kachiun asked.
“No, Kachiun! I have had enough of games. Take your men back to that plain and burn Yenking to the ground. That is the price I will have from him.”
Under his brother’s fury, Kachiun could only bow his head.
“Your will, my lord,” he said.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Nature has left this tincture in the blood,
That all men woul
d be tyrants if they could.
—DANIEL DEFOE
The birthdate of Genghis can only ever be estimated. Given the nomadic nature of the Mongol tribes, the year and location of his birth were never marked. In addition, small tribes would record the years in terms of local events, making it hard to match to calendars of the day. It is only when Genghis comes into contact with the larger world that the dates are known with any certainty. He invaded the Xi Xia region south of the Gobi in 1206 A.D. and was proclaimed khan of all the tribes in the same year. In the Chinese calendars, that was the year of Fire and of the Tiger, at the end of the Taihe era. He may have been as young as twenty-five or as old as thirty-eight when he united his people. I have not dwelled on the years of war and alliances as he slowly brought the great tribes together under his command. Interesting as that was, his story always had a wider scope. I recommend The Secret History of the Mongols, translated by Arthur Waley, for anyone wishing to know more of that period.
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The Naiman alliance was the last major coalition to resist being swept up into the new nation. The khan of the Naimans did climb Mount Nakhu, moving further and further up the slopes as the army of Genghis advanced. Genghis offered to spare his bondsmen, but they refused and he had them killed to the last man. The rest of the warriors and families were absorbed into his own forces.
Kokchu was a powerful shaman, also known as Teb-Tenggeri. Little is known of exactly how he became influential. Both Hoelun and Borte complained to Genghis about him at various points. His ability to influence Genghis became a great source of concern for those around the khan. Genghis himself believed in a single sky father: deism supported by the spirit world of shamanism. Kokchu remains something of an enigma. One law of the tribes was that it was forbidden to shed royal blood or that of holy men. I have not yet finished telling his story.
As the tribes gathered to Genghis’s call, the khan of the Uighurs wrote a declaration of loyalty almost exactly as I have it here. However, the incident of Khasar being beaten and Temuge forced to kneel involved sons of the Khongkhotan clan rather than the Woyela.
Genghis did flood the plain of the Xi Xia and was forced to retreat before the rising waters. Although it must have been embarrassing, the destruction of the crops brought the king to the negotiating table and eventually won a vassal for the Mongol people. It would not have been Genghis’s first encounter with the idea of paying tribute. Mongol tribes were known to negotiate in this way, though never on this scale. It is interesting to consider what Genghis must have made of the riches of the Xi Xia and, later, the emperor’s own city. He had no use for personal possessions beyond those he could carry on his horse. Tribute would have impressed the tribes and signaled his dominance, but otherwise had very little practical use.
The outcome for the Xi Xia might have been different if Prince Wei of the Chin empire had answered the call for aid. His message (in translation) was: “It is to our advantage when our enemies attack one another. Wherein lies the danger to us?”
When Genghis went round the Great Wall of China, he did so only by accident. His path to Yenking through Xi Xia lands neatly circumvented the wall. However, it is important to understand that the wall was a solid obstacle only in the mountains around Yenking—later known as Peking, then Beijing today. In other places, the wall was broken, or no more than a rampart of earth with an occasional guard post. In later centuries, the wall was joined into one continuous barrier to invasion.
It is worth noting that the Western pronunciation of Chinese place-names is always an approximation, using an alien alphabet to create the same sound. Thus, Xi Xia is sometimes rendered as Tsi-Tsia, or Hsi-Hsia, and Chin is sometimes written as Jin or even Kin. Sung is written as Song in some texts. I have managed to find twenty-one spellings of Genghis, from the exotic Gentchiscan and Tchen-Kis to the more prosaic Jingis, Chinggis, Jengiz, and Gengis. The Mongolian word ordo or ordu means camp or general headquarters. From this we derive the word horde. Some dictionaries give the word shaman as a word of Mongolian origin, and the Gurkhas of Nepal could well derive their name from Gurkhan, or khan of khans.
Genghis had four legitimate sons. As with all Mongol names, there are differences in spelling, much as the word Shakespeare is occasionally written as Shaksper, or Boadicea as Boudicca. Jochi is sometimes seen as Juji, Chagatai as Jagatai, Ogedai as Ogdai. His last son was Tolui, sometimes written as Tule.
As well as the Xi Xia princess, Genghis often accepted wives from his beaten enemies. One of his later decrees made all Mongol children legitimate, though the ruling did not seem to affect the right to inherit among his own sons.
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Walled cities were always a problem for Genghis. At the time of his attack on Yenking, that city was surrounded by fortress villages containing granaries and an arsenal. There were moats around the city walls and the walls themselves were almost fifty feet thick at the base, rising as high. The city had thirteen well-constructed gates and what is still the longest canal in the world, stretching more than a thousand miles south and east to Hangzhou. Most of the world’s capital cities have their beginnings on the shores of a great river. Beijing was built around three great lakes—Beihei to the north, Zhonghai (or Songhai) in the center, and Nanhai to the south. It may well be the oldest continuously occupied human settlement, as evidence of inhabitants has been found from nearly half a million years ago—Peking Man, as he is sometimes known.
At the time of Genghis’s attack through the pass of the Badger’s Mouth, Yenking had undergone a period of growth that resulted in walls five miles in circumference and a population of a quarter of a million households, or approximately a million people. It is possible to imagine as many as half a million more who would not show up on any official count. Even then, the famous “Forbidden City” within the walls and the emperor’s Summer Palace (destroyed by British and French soldiers in 1860) had not yet been built. Today, the city has a population of approximately fifteen million people, and it is possible to drive through the pass that was once host to one of the bloodiest battles in history. That too is a known date: 1211 A.D. Genghis had been leader of his people for five years at that point. He was in the prime of his physical strength and fought with his men. It is unlikely that he was much older than forty, but he may have been as young as thirty, as I have written here.
The battle of Badger’s Mouth pass is regarded as one of Genghis’s greatest victories. Vastly outnumbered and unable to maneuver, he sent men to flank the enemy, climbing mountains the Chin thought were impassable. The Chin cavalry were routed back into their own lines by the Mongol horse, and even ten years later, skeletons littered the ground around that place for thirty miles. With the usual problems of anglicized pronunciation, the pass is known in earlier works as Yuhung, which roughly translates as “Badger.”
Having lost the battle, General Zhi Zhong did indeed return and slay the young emperor, appointing another while he ruled as regent.
The city of Yenking was made to be impregnable and there were almost a thousand guard towers on the walls. Each one was defended by enormous crossbows that could fire a huge arrow two-thirds of a mile. In addition, they had trebuchet catapults capable of firing heavy loads for hundreds of yards over the walls. They had gunpowder and were just beginning to use it in war, though at this time it would have formed part of the defenses. Their catapults could have launched clay pots filled with distilled oil—petrol. Assaulting such a city fortress would have broken the back of the Mongol army, so they chose to devastate the country around it and starve Yenking to surrender.
It took four years and the inhabitants of Yenking were reduced to eating their own dead by the time they opened the gates and surrendered in 1215. Genghis accepted the surrender along with tribute of unimaginable value. He then traveled back to the grasslands of his youth, as he did throughout his life. With the siege ended, the emperor fled south. Though he did not turn back himself, Genghis sent an army to the city to take vengeance. P
arts of Yenking burned for a month.
Despite his hatred of the Chin, Genghis would not be the one who would see them occupied and subdued at last. That would fall to his sons and grandson Kubla. At the peak of his success, he left China and went west. It is true that the Islamic rulers refused to recognize his authority, but Genghis was too much of a visionary to react without thought. It is an odd fact, usually glossed over in the histories, that he left China when it was ready to fall at his feet. Perhaps it is simply because he was distracted from his hatred by the challenge of the Shah of Khwarazm, Ala-ud-dun-Mohammed. Genghis was not a man to let any challenge go unanswered. In fact, he seemed to revel in them.
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He understood the idea of nations and laws, slowly developing his own code, called the Yasa.
“If the great, the military leaders and the leaders of the many descendants of the ruler who will be born in the future, should not adhere strictly to the Yasa, then the power of the state will be shattered and come to an end. No matter how they seek Genghis Khan, they will not find him,” he declared.
In this, we see the visionary who could dream nations out of scattered tribes and understand what it entailed to rule across such a vast land.
The system of white tent, red tent, black tent, was used by Genghis as I have described. It was propaganda of a sort, designed to have cities fall quickly from fear. With grazing always an issue for the Mongol herds, prolonged sieges were to be avoided if possible. It suited neither their temperaments nor Genghis’s style of warfare, where speed and mobility were central factors. In a similar way, driving enemies toward a city to strain their resources is ruthless common sense. In some ways, Genghis was the ultimate pragmatist, but one feature of Mongol warfare is worth mentioning: revenge. The line “We have lost many good men” was often used to justify an all-out attack after a setback.
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