Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  Temujin was about twenty when word of his growing authority began to reach the Merkits. It was from the brother of the Merkits’ chief, Chiledu, that Yesugei had all those years before snatched Hoelun. The Merkits grazed their flocks a couple of hundred miles over the mountains to the north, by the Selenge River, the biggest of 128 streams that flow into Lake Baikal in what is Russian territory today. Revenge, if it was to come, had to be before Temujin grew too powerful. It required careful planning. Leaving the flocks in charge of the women and children, the clansmen crossed the Khentii range and launched their ambush while Temujin and his family were camped in this same broad valley near the Kherlen’s headwaters through which we are riding now, the valley that leads to Burkhan Khaldun.

  An old serving woman was the first to wake at the sound of hoofbeats and raised the alarm. Hoelun grabbed her granddaughter and galloped up the valley and crept into the thickly forested flanks of Burkhan Khaldun, sacred even then to all Mongols. Only Börte and the old serving woman remained. The Merkits dragged Börte onto the back of one of their horses and reckoned it revenge. Börte was given to Chiledu’s younger brother.

  Once again, Temujin was alone, back in hiding, sleeping rough and following the game trails on the flanks of Burkhan Khaldun that he knew so well. The Secret History records not Temujin’s despair at losing Börte, but rather gratitude to Burkhan Khaldun for saving his life. Temujin faced the rising sun, beat his chest, bowed nine times, and poured mutton fat and airag on the ground. Henceforth, he promised, “the seed of my seed” would always revere this mountain. If Burkhan Khaldun was the Mongols’ cathedral, Temujin was now its high priest.

  On Sacred Khaldun

  I was a louse

  But I escaped,

  And my life was spared.

  With a single horse,

  Following elk-trails,

  Making a tent of bark,

  I climbed Khaldun.

  On Sacred Khaldun

  I was a mere grasshopper,

  But I was protected.

  Later, Genghis Khan used the protection of Burkhan Khaldun as proof of his right to rule, his mandate from heaven. This was something new. For China’s emperors, the mandate came only after they had conquered. For Temujin, it was bestowed long before. It is key to how Temujin later came to be regarded with fear and wonder—how one man, as John Man describes it, put arrogance and extraordinary cruelty to the cause of conquest while at the same time being awed, as an ordinary man, by the inexplicable nature of the assignment that had fallen to him.

  But for now it was time to rescue Börte. Temujin called in his promise from Toghrul. The older man did not blink:

  In return for the coat of black sable

  I will crush the whole Merkit tribe

  And bring Lady Börte back to you.

  Toghrul sent his two ten thousands. Temujin had his own band of followers by now. For a week, they worked their way north through the Khentii forests and dropped down into the Selenge watershed, each man crossing the last river on a raft made of reeds, his horse swimming beside him. They put the Merkits to rout. Riding through the fleeing enemy, Temujin called out for Börte, who jumped out of one of the carts and into Temujin’s arms. He called off the battle. It was a fine victory. Not only was Börte found, but many women were taken as slaves and concubines. Börte was pregnant. Temujin’s first-born son, Jochi, grew up to be a great Mongol general. But questions about his paternity shut him off forever from the long line of Temujin’s heirs.

  From this moment on, with no end of narrative embellishment, The Secret History relates how power accrued to Temujin as his strength grew and ever more clans swore fealty to him. Temujin first brought together disparate nomadic groups, through force of arms, into a confederation of tribes. At some point the rumors about Temujin’s potency grew into hopes that he was the one to reunite a divided Mongol people. Hopes grew into prophecy, and then omens were reported—an ox had bellowed out that Heaven and Earth were both in agreement: Temujin should be the Mongols’ master. A decade of assimilation forged his confederation of tribes into a people with a sense of themselves. By 1200 or so, the Mongols had their khan, Genghis Khan.

  A nation again, it was time to conquer others. All the while, the key to what Man calls the paradoxical whirlwind of destructiveness and creativity that Genghis Khan was about to wreak, his extreme ruthlessness and his extreme generosity, lies in these high Khentii valleys on the embracing flanks of Burkhan Khaldun during the days Temujin spent hiding there.

  • • •

  We now move more slowly, the horses held back by the suck and squelch of boggier ground, hindquarters nearly swallowed on occasion in the mire. A low ridge at the valley head offers surer ground, and as we breast it, there to our northeast is Burkhan Khaldun itself, thick forest on its lower flanks, as The Secret History describes, bald slopes above, perhaps four or five miles away. Between the mountain and us is the Kherlen’s main tributary. Burkhan Khaldun’s smooth-backed ridge is broken by a dimple, an ovoo, a shamanistic cairn of white stones built up over the centuries by pilgrim generations.

  The mountain’s stature has grown with the ages. Neither women nor priests are allowed to climb it. Some say that a taboo, called the Ikh Turag, a kind of spiritual force field, holds sway over a surrounding area of one hundred–odd square miles. Not only did Genghis Khan grow up here. Many Mongolians are convinced that somewhere inside this field is Genghis Khan’s last resting place.

  Already by the end of the thirteenth century, Marco Polo was reporting that ordinary Mongolians no longer remembered where Genghis Khan was buried. Perhaps they never knew. After all, the great khan himself had asked for an anonymous grave. He had died in 1226, on campaign in what is now northwest China, fighting rebellious Tanguts whom he had subjugated once already. Possibly he was buried near where he died, but more likely his corpse was hurried home. The common telling is that this was done in the greatest secrecy. Summary execution awaited anyone who happened to see the cortège passing. That is one explanation for the general amnesia that Marco Polo described. Meanwhile, The Secret History claims that one day, when resting while out hunting, he so loved a certain view of Burkhan Khaldun that he asked to be buried right there. If anyone knows exactly where that is, they are not telling. Some Mongolians believe that a long line of their leaders has always known the spot where the great khan lies, with forty virgins and forty horses interred with him. If such a line exists, it has kept its secret.

  Mongolia has submitted remarkably little to archeological investigation. Not only are geography and climate harsh, but, until the end of Soviet tutelage two decades ago, an equally forbidding political environment held sway. Now a wall of superstition may prove the ultimate obstacle to finding Genghis’s tomb. Many Mongolians believe that to disturb Genghis Khan—wherever he lies—would be to invite catastrophe for the Mongol nation.

  A few years ago a lavish archeological expedition appeared in Mongolia, backed by the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest-circulation newspaper. The Three Rivers Expedition had sonar probes, global positioning systems, and three-dimensional mapping programs; they also had helicopters, lavish tents, fine food, and (a first in Mongolia?) portable toilets. The expedition leaders announced they were going off in search of Genghis Khan, and with all their paraphernalia appeared to have a good chance of finding him. Mongolians were appalled. The chaos and uncertainty of the recent years, in which they had thrown off the Soviet yoke and established a fragile democracy, would prove nothing compared with the dire events that would follow if the grave of Genghis Khan, guardian of the nation, were found and opened. The team dug. Mongolians staged angry demonstrations in Ulan Bator’s main square. The government held its breath. The archeologists found many lesser graves. But they never found the great khan’s. The expedition returned to Ulan Bator and made for the airport. This time the crowds were cheering at their departure, for the catastrophe predicted in the
old belief of not letting Genghis Khan lie had been averted.

  • • •

  By now a storm is rolling in from the heart of the Khentii range. Burkhan Khaldun is gone, and soon we are being lashed by buckshot hail, adding to saddle-sore discomfort. It is late, and we have been on the move all day. Quickening their pace, the horses appear as keen as we are to find shelter. We recross the Kherlen tributary. On the other side, a raised tableland proves to be drier ground, while a group of pines at the far end of it, a mile or so away, promises shelter. The horses break into a canter.

  By the time our tents are up and we have lit a fire, the clouds have cleared, the mist has rolled back, and above is a burst of stars, with satellites carving blinking tracks across the sky. Steam rises from our sodden dels as we bank up the fire. Once we are tolerably warm again, Morgan orders Gala back to their tent to conduct a leech-hunting session, with a running set of intimate instructions drifting across the intervening distance of where he should look. With a satisfied grunt, Gala finds one clamped to the back of her thigh. During a day’s riding, leeches climb down boots and up trousers, or drop onto your head from branches above.

  Hunger sets in. Gala and Morgan bring over the churns, rummaging through our provisions. Horror spreads across both faces. Low recriminations fly. Half of a sheep has been left in Ulan Bator. All we have are instant noodles and bags of oats, and not much of either. For Mongolians, who consume quantities of meat and little else, we are somewhere close to the worst disaster it is possible to imagine out in the wild. What Batjargal and Bayara are about to be offered is horse food. With the prospect of several meatless days, I am also inclined to share the sense of tragedy. Slowly, Gala walks toward his saddlebag and pulls from it a pint of vodka. Opening the bottle, he flicks libations to the sky, the ground, and then to Burkhan Khaldun. In silence, he passes us, each in turn, a glass of consolation.

  Over instant noodles, the talk turns to hunting. Twenty years ago, just before Mongolia lurched from Soviet-led Communism to a Wild West brand of democracy, the Khentii mountains were designated a natural reserve, the Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area, a sweep half as big again as Yellowstone National Park, running across three Mongolian provinces. Not unlike in the United States, when nineteenth- and twentieth-century park planners invented the American wilderness, people who had long ranged through the Khentii mountains were also cast out of this particular Eden. Our high, narrow plateau must for centuries have been a summer camp for herders, or a crossing place for forest tribes as they followed the fall bugling of red deer. If the Three Rivers Expedition had found no trace of Genghis Khan, it uncovered dozens of simple graves that belonged, presumably, to minor Hun or Turkic chiefs.

  Now, says Batjargal, no one goes this way except those gathering pine nuts, and poachers. Batjargal is one of only a handful of Khentii rangers. The park is so vast that though he spends his life in it, he has not been this way in several years. It had been midwinter the last time, and he had spent a whole month up here, with two fellow rangers. Each man brought along a spare horse, for carrying food and in case his chief mount went lame. It was cold then, he said, but at least every man had enough meat, cooked each night from frozen. Batjargal stabbed witheringly at his polystyrene pot.

  The days after the park was established, Batjargal says, were not good to wildlife. It was the end of Communism. On the steppe, the herders’ socialist collectives were disbanded overnight. Government welfare collapsed, and each family was cast adrift. Men headed into the mountains to hunt for the pot. “What could I do? People in Mongonmorit just helped themselves to the forest. In the evenings I would walk around the town. I could tell from the cooking smells what each family had shot. Hare, red deer, roe deer, moose, bear, boar: it was all boiling away on people’s stoves.”

  Soon Russian hunters from across a lawless border were also filling the forests. But the most relentless poaching of all happened because of Chinese demand for musk deer, bear paws and bile, and rare plants with qualities renowned in Chinese medicine. Every Mongolian settlement had its dealer who knew the price of things in China. Other more entrepreneurial types set to chopping down the forest, turning larch trees into disposable chopsticks for Mongolia’s southern neighbor. All around, the forest was dying.

  Yet things are changing, Batjargal says, and for the better. As soon as the game was shot out, most of the poachers left the park: “And now the fines are huge.” Batjargal and his fellow rangers track hunters by following their trails back to encampments hidden in the forest. Often this is not as hard as it sounds, for the poachers are heroic drinkers, leaving behind them a spoor of vodka bottles—we were to come across them later. The rangers surround the camp at night and catch its occupants in a state of extreme befuddlement, docile rather than sober and ruthless. Rifles are confiscated and fines imposed, to be paid when the poachers turn up on the plain again some days later. So now, Batjargal murmurs, the animals, slowly, are coming back.

  While Batjargal talked, Bayara was silent, studying the fire. I ask him, did he know this remote country well? He might, he replies with a quick glance up, have been up this way once or twice. And what was he doing? Just looking. Oh, said Gala, picking up the drift, and had he packed a rifle for this sightseeing trip? Perhaps he had done just that, yes, just in case. Pressed further, Bayara admits that perhaps he had taken a bear or a moose out with him, just one or two. He flashes a brief but huge, guilty grin. This time Batjargal is gazing at the fire, as if he has not heard.

  For Batjargal the horseman, the outdoorsman, the man who knows the tracks of everything that moves in the forest, his particular pride, it soon is clear, is that he has spent his working life protecting not so much a national park, but rather the great hunting grounds of Genghis Khan. For when the Khentii range was designated a protected area, it was not for the first time. Eight centuries earlier Genghis Khan himself had decreed that no one should hunt here unless all Mongols, at his command, did so together. This side of the Genghis Khan story is less well known, even to Mongolians, than the tales that swirl about Burkhan Khaldun. The scale of Genghis Khan’s hunting needs no exaggeration. With the possible exception of the fishing-out of today’s oceans by factory ships, Genghis Khan quite certainly conducted the biggest animal hunts in history. And it was these hunts that forged the discipline, the stamina, and the training with which his armies went out and conquered the world.

  • • •

  Each year the Mongols held a hunt, at the onset of winter. Every man in the army was involved. First, a starting line was marked out, some eighty miles long. Along the line flags were planted around which each tumen assembled. Ahead, sometimes hundreds of miles ahead, another flag marked the finishing point. The army was divided into three wings, each in the charge of a great general. Royal women and concubines followed behind, as did prodigious quantities of food and drink—no lack of mutton there. Slowly, the army drove the game before it, the wings of the army wheeling in to form a ring. If ever any game broke out of the ring, scrupulous inquiries were held, and those commanders found to be negligent faced death.

  Over two or three months the game was driven into an ever tighter circle, the circumference made up of soldiers riding shoulder to shoulder. A Persian scholar, Juvaini, in service to the Mongol khan of Baghdad some decades after the death of Genghis Khan, left a haunting description of a Mongol hunt. As the constriction of this mile-wide ring tightened, the commotion inside grew wilder and “lions became familiar with wild asses, hyaenas friendly with foxes, wolves intimate with hares.” But after the commotion, immobility: the ring got so tight that the trapped game were unable to stir. At that point the great khan rode and began the slaughter. Once he tired, his noyans, his feudal lords, took over, followed by commanders and then troops. Days passed in slaughter, until the older men, no longer thrilled by death, interceded for the lives of the stragglers. They approached the khan, offered up prayers for his well-being, and asked that the surviving beasts be
set free. Juvaini had heard of a hunt that Genghis Khan oversaw from his seat on a hilltop. All at once, the trapped animals at the bottom of the hill turned toward the khan’s throne and “set up a wailing and lamentation like that of petitioners for justice.”

  Now war with its killing—counting of the slain and sparing of the survivors—is after the same fashion, and indeed analogous in every detail, because all that is left in the neighborhood of the battlefield are a few broken-down wretches.

  The hunt and war: all at once this empty country toward the source of the Onon lost its wild innocence. These uplands of bog and stream became accomplice to a violence that created the biggest empire the world has seen.