Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  “The Mongols will live in peace,” he whispered, as if talking to himself. “At last.”

  Sensing what he wanted to hear, I went on, “There will be no more war among the tribes of the Gobi, no more blood feuds between families. The law of the High Khan, the Yassa, will be revered and obeyed.”

  Ogotai nodded happily. “It is good. I am content.”

  I wondered what to tell him next, how to get back to the subject of Ahriman and my mission.

  “You wonder why I am happy at the thought of peace?” Ogotai asked. “Why the High Khan of a race of warriors does not seek further conquests?”

  “Your brothers and sons…”

  “Yes, they still reach out. While there is land for a pony to tread upon, they will battle to possess it.” He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “All my life I have spent in wars. Why do you think I spared you a test of your strength this night?”

  I smiled at him. “Because I had no shoes?”

  With a fleeting grin, he replied, “No, Orion. I have seen enough arrows flying through the air. I have seen enough swordplay. I yearn for peace, for an end to pain and battles.”

  “Wise men prefer peace to war,” I said.

  “Then wise men are more rare than trees on the Gobi.”

  “Peace will come, in time. High Khan.”

  “Long after I have returned to my ancestors,” he said without a trace of bitterness. It was merely a statement of fact.

  “My lord High Khan,” I started, then hesitated.

  “You want to speak about your enemy, Ahriman. What is the matter between you? A blood feud? A family quarrel?”

  “Yes, you could call it that. He is an evil one, High Khan. He means you no good.”

  “He has served me well in the short time he has been at Karakorum. The warriors fear him, but they like his prophecies of victory.”

  “High Khan, anyone can predict victory for the Mongols. When have you known defeat?”

  Ogotai’s tired face lit up briefly. With a laugh, he said, “That is true enough. But still, even my generals want to hear prophecies of success. It makes them feel better. And Ahriman has helped me to feel better as well. He is on his way here and should arrive shortly.”

  “Here? To your tent?”

  “I summon him almost every night. He has a potion that helps me to sleep. It’s better than the wine of Shiraz.”

  My mind went into a spin, trying to digest this new information.

  “It would be best if the two of you did not meet,” Ogotai said. “At the slightest threatening move, my guards would kill you both.”

  That was my dismissal. With a bow I took my leave of the High Khan.

  CHAPTER 18

  I could not sleep that night, although to say “night” is misleading. The sky was already pearl-gray with the coming dawn when I returned to my house from Ogotai’s tent.

  Agla was wide awake, waiting for me. We talked as the sky brightened into true morning. Finally she could keep her eyes open no longer and drifted into slumber, her head resting on my shoulder. I can get along with little sleep. I lay beside her, wondering what I should do next.

  I had not been placed here by mistake or misdirection. Ahriman was here, working his plan for the destruction of the human race. He saw Ogotai nightly and gave him some sort of drink to help the High Khan sleep. Medicine? Liquor? Slow poison?

  Why did Ogotai need help to sleep? Did his conscience bother him? He said he was tired of wars and slaughter, but yet he ruled an empire which had to keep expanding, or it would collapse into tribal wars. That was what Ye Liu Chutsai had told me.

  I shook my head. It made little sense to me. Ogotai lived off the wealth of all Asia, longing for peace, while his brothers and nephews spread fire and havoc in the Middle East, Europe, and China. How can this be a nexus in the space-time continuum? What did Ahriman plan to do here? How could I stop him if I did not know what he was trying to accomplish?

  There was one way, of course. Simply kill Ahriman. Lie in wait for him at his stone church and slit his throat. Kill him the way he killed Aretha, without mercy or hesitation.

  But a countering idea struck me. Perhaps that is what Ahriman wants! He has made no secret of his presence here. He has not tried to harm me or Agla. He has not tried to prevent my learning that he visits Ogotai’s tent each night. Perhaps his murder would trigger a sequence of events that would accomplish his goal here, whatever that goal might be.

  I felt suspended in midair, hanging on nothingness while two powerful forces pulled me in opposite directions. I was being torn apart, but there was nothing I could do about it. I could not move, could not take action, until I learned more about Ahriman’s plans.

  My deliberations, and Agla’s sleep, were rudely shattered by an insistent pounding on our front door.

  “What is it?” Agla wondered, instantly awake.

  The pounding sounded like whoever it was would break the door down.

  I pulled my robe around me as I got to my feet. Agla burrowed deeper under the bedclothes, looking frightened.

  Opening the door — there were no locks in Karakorum — I saw a stumpy, wizened old man with skin that looked as tough as tree bark and fists almost the size of his shaved head. He wore shabby, stained clothes and had a huge leather satchel slung over one shoulder.

  “So you’re awake!” he snapped at me.

  I glared down at him. “I am now.”

  He gave a disgusted snort. “I know how long those drinking bouts go on in the ordu. And while the High Khan is in his cups people get him to promise them things.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “The bootmaker, who else?” He pushed past me and entered the house. “A messenger from the High Khan ordered me to come to you and make you a pair of boots. As if I don’t have enough to do! But do they care? Not them! Make this stranger from the western lands a pair of boots! The High Khan himself has ordered it! Do it quickly or we’ll all lose our heads! So here I am, whether you like it or not. I may have spoiled your sleep, but by all the gods you’ll have a pair of boots that will please the High Khan, and you’ll have them before the drinking starts again this evening.”

  He sat flat on the floor of the front room and began unpacking his satchel. I had my boots by that evening, all right, and fine and comfortable they were. But I never met a worse tyrant among all the Mongols than that bootmaker.

  Ogotai had taken a liking to me, and he invited me to his pavilion frequently. One day he took me riding, out beyond the bedlam of the crowded, dirty, noisy lanes of the growing city, past the vast horse corrals and cattle barns, out into the endless, rolling grasslands.

  “This is the true home of the Mongol,” he told me, turning in his saddle to survey the vast, empty, treeless grassland. He took a deep breath of air unpolluted by crowded buildings and people.

  I told him, “Far to the west, in a land called Greece, when the natives there first saw men riding on horses — long ages ago — they thought that the man and horse were one creature. They called them Centaurs.”

  Ogotai smiled in the sunlight. “Truly, a Mongol without a horse is not much of a man.”

  We rode frequently together. At first Ogotai brought a guard of warriors with him, but soon enough he rode with me alone. He enjoyed my company and he trusted me. I told him about the lands and people ofEurope, of the great kings that were yet to be and of the glories of the ancient empires. He was especially interested in Rome, and disappointed when I spoke of the corruption and decay of its empire.

  “We would not have High Khans such as Tiberius or Caligula — they can only exist when the Orkhons are spineless. That is not the way Mongols are.”

  Agla did not trust the High Khan’s friendship. “You are playing with fire. Sooner or later the Dark One will put a spell on Ogotai, or he will get drunk and pick a quarrel with you.”

  “He’s not that kind of man,” I said.

  She fixed me with those luminous gray eyes of hers, as en
dlessly deep as an infinite ocean. “He is the High Khan, a man who has the power to slaughter whole cities and nations. Your life or mine does not matter to such a man.”

  I started to tell her that she was wrong, but heard myself say, rather weakly, “I don’t think so.

  Agla remained unconvinced.

  The summer wore on with me still stranded on dead center, not knowing what to do or what Ahriman was planning. Messengers galloped in from the west, breathless with the news of Subotai’s victory over Bela on the plain of Mohi. Weeks later, long caravans of camels and mules arrived, heaped high with armor and weapons and jewelry, Subotai’s spoils from Hungary and Poland.

  I never saw Ahriman. It was as if we operated in two different time-frames, two separate dimensions. He was there in Karakorum,. I knew. He knew I was there as well. We both saw Ogotai almost daily — or nightly. Yet, either by the High Khan’s adroit planning or Ahriman’s, we never met face to face in all those many weeks.

  The wind sweeping down from the north began to have an edge to it. The grass was still green, but soon the storms of autumn would begin, and then the winter snows. In the old days the Mongols would move their camp southward and collide with other tribes who claimed the same pasture lands along the edge of the Gobi. Now, with Karakorum becoming more of a fixed city every day, the High Khan prepared to stay the winter and defy the winds and storms that were to come.

  The Mongols organized a hunt each autumn, and Ye Liu Chutsai summoned me to his tent to tell me that the High Khan requested my company on the hunt.

  The mandarin’s tent was a tiny slice of China transported to the Mongolian steppes. Solid, heavy furniture of teak and ebony, chests inlaid with ivory and gold, an air of quiet and harmony — unlike the boisterous, almost boyish energy of the Mongols. It was the tent in which I had asked him for my first meeting with Ogotai. I had not realized then that Liu lived in it. Now I could sense the philosopher’s stoicism all about me: Ye Liu Chutsai slept here, probably on that cherrywood bench covered with silks, but this tent was really a home for the books and parchment scrolls and stargazing instruments of the mandarin — more precious and rare than the body of an aging Chinese administrator.

  “The High Khan has shown a great fondness for you,” Liu said, after sitting me down at his cluttered desk and offering me tea.

  “I have a great fondness for him,” I admitted. “He is a strangely gentle man to be the emperor of the world.”

  Liu sipped from his miniature teacup before replying, “He rules wisely — by allowing his generals to expand the empire while he maintains the law of the Yassa within it.”

  “With your help,” I said.

  “Behind every great ruler stand wise administrators. The way to determine if a ruler is great or not is to observe whom he has selected to serve him.”

  Cardinal Richelieu came to my mind.

  “Yet, despite your friendship,” Liu went on, speaking slowly, carefully, “the one called Ahriman is also close to the High Khan.”

  “The High Khan has many friends.”

  The mandarin placed his cup delicately on the lacquered tray next to the still-steaming teapot. “I would not say that Ahriman is his friend. Rather, the man seems to have become something of a physician to the High Khan.”

  That startled me. “Physician? Is the High Khan ill?”

  “Only in his heart,” said Liu. “He wearies of his life of idleness and luxury. Yet the alternative is to lead an army into the field and conquer new lands.”

  “He won’t do that,” I said, remembering how Ogotai had told me he was sick of bloodshed.

  “I agree. He cannot. Hulagu, Subotai, Kubilai — they lead the armies. Ogotai’s task is to remain in Karakorum and be the High Khan. If he began to gather an army together, what would the Orkhons think? There are no lands for him to conquer except those already being put to the sword by the Orkhons.”

  I began to understand. Ogotai literally had no worlds left to conquer.Europe,China, the Middle East were all being attacked already. He would start a civil war among the Mongols if he went marching in any direction.

  But then I thought of India.

  “What about the land to the south of the great mountains, the Roof of the World?”

  “Hindustan?” Ye Liu Chutsai came as close to scoffing as his cool self-restraint would allow. “It is a land teeming with diseased beggars and incredibly rich maharajahs. The heat there kills men and horses. The Mongols will not go there.”

  Liu was wrong. I seemed to remember that the Mongols eventually did conquer India, or at least a part of it. They were called Moghuls by the natives, a name that became so associated with power and splendor that in the twentieth century it was cynically pinned on Hollywood executives.

  The mandarin brought me out of my reverie by saying, “Fortunately, it is the season for the hunt. Perhaps that will cure the ache in the High Khan’s soul, and he will have no need of Ahriman’s sleeping draughts for a while.”

  CHAPTER 19

  A hunt by the Mongols was little less than a military campaign directed against animals instead of men. The Mongols had never heard of sportsmanship or ecology. When they went out to hunt, it was to provide food for the clan over the bitterly cold and long winter. They organized with enormous thoroughness and efficiency.

  Young officers scouted out territories of hundreds of square miles and brought reports back to the ordu so that the elders could select the best location for the hunt. Once the place was selected, the Mongols got onto their ponies and rode out in military formation. They formed an immense circle, perhaps as much as a hundred miles in circumference. Every animal within that circle was to be killed. Without exception. Without pity.

  The hunt took more than a week. No actual killing was allowed until the High Khan gave the signal, and he would wait until the noose of armed horsemen had been pulled to its tightest around the doomed animals.

  Between the horsemen walked the beaters, clanging swords on shields, shouting, thrashing the brush all day long, driving the animals constantly inward toward the center of the circle. At night they lit bonfires that kept the beasts within the trap. All day long we rode, drawing closer and closer to each other as the circle tightened.

  At first I could see no animals except our own horses. Nothing but slightly rolling grassland, with waist-high brush scattered here and there. By the third day, though, even I could spot small deer, rabbits, wolves darting through the high grass. An air of panic was rising among the animals as predator and prey fled side-by-side from the terrifying noises and smells of the humans.

  I rode on the High Khan’s left, separated from him by two other horsemen, nephews of his. Ye Liu Chutsai had not been invited to the hunt, nor would he have been happy out here in the steppes. I could see that Ogotai loved it, even though the physical strain must have been hard on him. He was in the saddle at daybreak like the rest of us, but bymiddayhe grew haggard and quiet. He would fall out of the line then, and rest through the afternoon. At night he retired early, without the long drinking bouts he led at Karakorum. But even though his body seemed stiff with age and pain, Ogotai’s spirits remained high. He was free of the luxuries and cares of the court, breathing clean fresh air, away from the decisions that had weighed upon him at Karakorum.

  And I felt free, too. Ahriman was far from my mind. I thought of Agla, especially at night as I drowsed off to sleep on the hard ground, wrapped in a smelly horse blanket. But all that could wait. They would still be in Karakorum when we returned: problems never go away; they simply wait or grow worse until you return. For the present I was enjoying myself hugely, and I recalled that the Persian word, paradise, originally meant a hunting ground.

  It would ruin the whole strategy of the hunt if animals were allowed to break through the tightening circle of horsemen. For the first few days, the animals simply fled from us, but as the noose closed in on them, some of the terrified beasts tried to break out. There was no alternative but to kill them. To allow eve
n one to escape was regarded as a disgrace.

  The sour-faced Kassar was riding on my left the morning that a wolf, slavering with fear and hate, launched himself at the space between us. Kassar spitted him on his lance while I sat on my pony, too hesitant to beat him to the game. The wolf howled with agony and tried to reach around and gnaw at the lance, but three of the beaters rushed up and clubbed it to death.

  Kassar laughed and waved his bloody lance high over his head, while I thought how strange it was that I could kill a man without an instant’s hesitation, yet allowed Kassar to move first on the brute animal.

  Later that day I found myself riding next to Ogotai. His nephews had stopped for a quick meal of dried meat and a change of mounts. The afternoon sun felt warm, although the breeze was cool.

  “Do you enjoy the hunt, man of the West?” he asked me.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s like a military campaign.”

  He nodded. “True. It is a chance for the younger warriors to show their bravery and their ability to carry out orders. Many a general has been trained in battle against the beasts of the fields.”

  So this was the Mongol version of the playing fields of Eton.

  A servant rode up with some dried meat and fruits in a leather pouch, along with a silver flask of wine. Ogotai shared the meal with me as we kept on riding. Ahead of us, animals were scurrying, leaping, running in circles through the grass, more confused and terrified with each inexorable step our ponies took.

  Ogotai was draining the last drop of wine, tipping the silver flask high and holding his head far back, when a boar broke out of a small thicket and started a mad dash directly toward us. The High Khan could not see the animal, but his pony did. Neighing wildly, it reared back on its hind legs.

  Anyone but a Mongol would have been thrown out of the saddle. As it was, Ogotai lost the reins he was holding loosely in his left hand. The wine flask went flying, but he grabbed the pony’s mane and held on.

  I saw all this out of the corner of my eye, because my attention was focused on the boar. I could see its hate-filled red eyes and flecks of saliva flying from its open mouth. The beast’s tusks gleamed like twin daggers, backed by a thickly muscled neck and a strong, compact body bristling with fury.