“Once he fled from us,” chuckled the old men of the Merkit. “He abandoned his women and the children to us. He ran into the barrens, and we hunted him.”
“Ye think only of killing,” said the old men. “We think only of peace.” And they mourned among themselves that discipline had not been enforced, and a proper respect for age had not been inculcated in their children. “In our youth,” they said, “our fathers were our gods. We respected them and bowed before them. Woe unto us, that we have begotten a race of impudent liars and scorners of authority.”
All through the Gobi the spirit of unrest ran on red feet, whispering and condemning, urging and promising. And wherever it whispered, there disunity resulted, and angry voices, and confusion. Long before the hordes of the Yakka Mongols appeared, the people were disorganized, quarrelling and vacillating, and many tribes laid down their arms and gave the oath of fealty without the loss of a single life.
“Confuse a people in their own midst, and thou shalt take them without a blow,” Temujin said.
But still, there were many peoples remaining, much stronger than Temujin’s, and derisive in their strength. “Let him take the weak,” they said scornfully. “But us he shall not take.”
They listened to the tales about Temujin, and laughed, and went about their business. They made jokes about Temujin’s theory that there must be among all peoples one supreme people. “What!” they exclaimed, “doth he think his Mongols superior to us—doth he truly believe they were born to be kings over other men?”
Among the mightiest of the people of the Gobi were the Karait and the Tatars, and before them, in their pride, their ferocity, and in the case of the Kerait, their civilization, Temujin was only a prowling petty chieftain afflicted with a dream. They laughed at him and forgot him, letting him conquer weak peoples, and even telling themselves that at least he had made the caravan routes safe, at a price. For this, they said, they owed him a measure of gratitude.
Chapter 2
Deep in the barrens, in the wastes and steppes of the Gobi, Temujin sleeplessly busied himself with his consolidation of the little peoples and tribes whom he had absorbed. It was nothing to him that the mighty Karait and the Tatars laughed at him, and forgot him. “Let them laugh, and forget,” he said, when it was reported to him by his spies. “Laughter and forgetfulness are mine allies. But some day they will not laugh, and never again will they forget.”
In the meantime, more and more traders paid him tribute to protect their caravans. The Chinese paid him huge sums and gave him vast treasures for this protection. “At last,” many of them said, “we have some semblance of order in the heart of the horrible Gobi. This man hath made men of ravaging beasts, and it is nothing to us how he hath accomplished this. He hath created order out of a jungle.” And now their historians deigned to give him a line or two in their recordings.
But for the most part, the mighty and the rich, the secure and the fortressed, had never heard of him. Behind the great wall of Cathay, built less to keep out barbarian invaders than to keep the flower of civilization within, the enormous empire went about its business and knew nothing of a young Mongol khan and his petty confederacy in the lost barrens of a desert of which they had only vaguely heard, and shuddered delicately upon hearing.
Temujin, indeed, was only a little savage chieftain lost in the wastes, busy about his own tiny affairs, his antlike manipulations. The Chinese were more aware of the mighty Tatars, beating like sullen but still inoffensive waves against the Great Wall. “Their women give birth to litters,” complained a Cathayan noble. “Some day we shall have to reckon with sheer weight of numbers.”
But the others laughed. “The barbarians are armed only with bows. They are only lumbering bears, these Tatars. In the meantime, our horsemen ride the tops of our walls, and our gates are guarded by the best soldiers in the world.”
So civilization slept and dreamed, and the Tatars muttered and quarrelled near the walls, or rode out in vast armies to plunder the surrounding country. And occasionally, their elegant and civilized masters, the Chinese, had to send, with immense boredom, some expeditions against these barbarians, merely to call attention to their own might, and the inadequacy of the Tatars, much in the fashion of a father languidly disciplining one of his many and annoying sons.
But the Tatars received these expeditions with less and less respect, and even showed much fight and resistance. And finally, the Chinese, annoyed and detesting, decided something must be done once and for all, against them, in order to teach these stinking barbarians their proper place in the scheme of things.
History, who had yawned for a thousand years in Asia, stirred on her dust-covered couch, and opened her eyes. And when she opened them, an ominous sound struck upon her ears—the long subterranean mutter of barbarians at the gate of civilization. She sighed, sat up, shook the dust from the pages of brittle manuscript, and reread the ancient story. And then she took up her pen and moistened it, and waited. “It is an old tale,” she said, and her old bones moved wearily, for she had thought to sleep forever.
“What shall be the name of the monster in this hour?” she thought. “From whence will he rise again? From the east, from the west, from the north, from the south? A thousand times he hath risen and conquered, and at the end is conquered. But always he doth come, and always the old tale is rewritten.”
She yawned wearily, and wondered whether the day would ever come when the monster would be forever destroyed, and she could sink into eternal sleep.
Among those who did not laugh at Temujin, the little forager of the barrens and the steppes, was Toghrul Khan, who had his own spies.
“Men make a great error when they hear a man boasting, and say that because he boasteth he will never act,” he said, to his son, Taliph. “That is a vicious aphorism. Men who act first talk. I fear talkers.”
“But do not think so much of this Temujin,” said Taliph. “I confess I used to think of him. But now he hath sunk back into his proper perspective—an ambitious little ant-king surrounded by thousands of empty miles. Let him have his small day among the other ants. Think, this day, of the Tatars.”
But some strange obstinacy made the old khan think of Temujin.
“History is always contemporary,” he observed.
Taliph was impatient. “If that is so, then it hath begun to sing of the Tatars.”
But still Toghrul Khan thought of Temujin, and he could not shake it off. “I should have killed him when I had the opportunity,” he said. “Who knoweth? Maybe men might have been grateful for this killing.”
Taliph thought his father in his dotage. It seemed folly to him to waste a thought on such an insignificant insect as Temujin, who was certainly no menace to the great Karait peoples. One single army of the Karait could destroy him overnight, and leave no trace even upon the Gobi. Indeed, his father was in his dotage. But he had not been quite the same since the death of Azara, that idiot girl who had nestled so deeply into her father’s heart. For months the old man had cried without ceasing: “Why did she do this thing? Was I a harsh father? Did I strike her down and despise her? Nay, I loved her. She was my heart’s darling. She was the spark of mine old eyes. I had given her as bride to a great prince of her mother’s people, and she would have been a queen. Why did she do this thing, my child, my lovely one?”
Taliph thought this incessant mourning indecent, for Azara had only been a woman, after all. It was obscene for a man to lament like this for cheap girl-flesh, however beautiful. It was comtemptible even to seek for a reason for this suicide. Any clever man knew that women were unpredictable cattle, and only fools tried to fathom the reasons for their blind follies.
Taliph was glad, however, that his father had begun to speak of something else besides Azara. The endless chant had disgusted him. So he talked of the Tatars, who were a real menace, by reason of their very numbers, to the peace of the cities.
“They need discipline again,” he said.
But Toghrul
Khan spoke only of Temujin. “I should have killed him,” he repeated.
“Thou wasteth too much time in thinking of one of the least of thy vassals, my father.”
Toghrul Khan gazed deeply before him with sunken and feverish eyes.
“He is a shadow of fire on the black dawn of the future,” he murmured. “I dreamed last night that he rode out of that black dawn, and he and his horse reached from the earth to the sky. I could not remember his name, and some one whispered to me that he was immortal, and had had many names, and would have many more.”
But Taliph was wrong in assuming that his father was in his dotage. Never had the old man been so aware of events. He listened closely to the reports of his legions of spies, who were everywhere in Asia. And that strange prescience of his made him listen even more attentively to the reports of Temujin. He even knew that Temujin had another son now, and would soon have another. Three sons, then. “The litter of the Beast,” he said aloud, and was terrified at the involuntary words.
He knew the names of Temujin’s chief noyon, his half-brother, Belgutei; his brother, Kasar, and Subodai, Chepe Noyon, and Jamuga Sechen. They were not the names of ants to him, despite the occasional arguments of his reason. They were names of visitations.
And then one day he had a summons from a great Chinese general to appear at the latter’s court within the Wall.
Chapter 3
Toghrul Khan was the close friend of the general, who was of the formidable Chin Empire, which did not particularly like the Empire of the Sung, the Kingdom of Hia, and the Empire of Black Cathay. These various Chinese Empires were jealous of each other, though they maintained a more or less civilized tolerance and elegant exchange. They were all united in their love for their own civilization and contempt for what they called the nameless hordes beyond the Wall. But hatred was brooding in their garden, like a crimson flower, awaiting only the moment to burst into full and dreadful bloom out of the corruption and decadence of the thronged cities.
The general was languidly annoyed. “We have been negligent,” he said. “Now it is time to discipline the barbarians again. I call upon thee, Toghrul Khan, to summon the best among thy vassals and give us assistance against the Tatars.” He yawned. “It is very boring,” he added.
He privately thought Toghrul Khan himself a barbarian, only partly civilized, in spite of his Karait cities and his Persian palace. He had been a graduate of a military school, in which he had learned that civilized gentlemen use their barbarian allies to subdue other barbarians. It was much easier on the gentlemen, and when barbarians fought, gentlemen could return to their own pursuits, happy in the fact that the others were murdering each other, and thus rendering themselves mutually less a menace to their masters. It was all very neat, and every one was satisfied.
“What shall I get out of this?” asked Toghrul Khan.
The general stared, but was polite enough, after a moment, to stop staring. He was much younger than the Karait Khan, and he passingly wondered what more the old man wanted, for surely he was on the verge of the grave, with his death’s head and shaking hands.
He smiled gently. “We shall give thee the Chinese title of Wang, or prince, my good old friend,” he answered, “and the first share of any spoils thou dost seize. All of them, if thou canst so persuade thy vassals.”
“Not enough,” said Toghrul. Khan. “I want a palace and a permanent income within the Wall.”
The general raised his brows delicately. “But why, my friend?”
Toghrul Khan said stubbornly: “That is my desire.”
And then the general saw that deep within the sunken and crafty eyes there was the pale shadow of fear. But fear of what? Surely his own Karait cities were fortressed and guarded enough?
Toghrul Khan repeated in a dull but obstinate voice: “A house within the Wall.”
The general shrugged, and frowned a little to himself. He knew the emperor disliked any alien becoming entrenched within the empire. Aliens, he had said, bring other aliens, and aliens are always enemies. But, this time—It was better for the Karait barbarians to die rather than Chinese.
“Very well,” he said, cordially, “thou shalt have it. And let me extend to thee, at this time, my own personal welcome.”
At home, Toghrul Khan muttered to himself: “Wang. Wang Khan. A prince of Cathay! And a house behind the Wall. The beautiful Wall! The invincible Wall!”
For the first time in long and anguished months, he slept and did not dream.
On the day of the birth of his third son, Ogotai, Temujin received the summons from Toghrul Khan. He now had three sons, Juchi, the Shadowed, and Chutagi, and Ogotai. He made no distinction between Juchi and the two younger children; they were all children of the body of Bortei, whom he loved, and whom he understood. He delighted in the boys, all dark and sturdy and gray-eyed, like Bortei; he especially delighted in Ogotai, who had his red hair. Houlun, in her rare moments of affability, told her son that Ogotai might have been himself at his own birth.
But these affable moments became more infrequent. For Houlun could not speak to Temujin without irony, scorn, condemnation or anger. She and Kurelen were the only ones who did not appear to fear him. She openly disliked Bortei, and as she was still mistress of the yurts, she made Bortei’s life miserable on occasion, telling her that she knew as little as a mere virgin serving-girl of the care of children, that she was vain and silly and full of greed, and, in short, no fit wife for a Yakka Mongol khan. Between the two women the hatred had become malignant, and part of Houlun’s hatred was because of her lost influence with her son. She well knew that the woman who shared a man’s bed also had his ear, and she suspected, with truth, that Bortei spoke slightingly of her husband’s mother, and all in a voice of indulgent amusement. So wounded pride and loneliness sharpened the older woman’s tongue, and even when she spoke in rage there was a hurt sadness in her eyes.
She, herself, had no love for Jamuga Sechen, whom she vigorously and audibly considered a fool. But she did not subscribe to the malicious reports that he was disaffected, though she, herself, had occasionally declared he was. In her reason, which was vigorous and cool, she knew that Jamuga was no traitor, that he was merely cursed with a peculiar conscience, the like of which she had never known before. But being clever and subtle, herself, she understood his conscience, though she derided it. She knew, too, of Jamuga’s passionate love for Temujin, and knew that he suffered, as she did, because of it. Jamuga found himself with an unexpected ally in this lonely mother of his anda, and though by nature cold and suspicious of every one, he began to feel a shy gratitude. He knew that this alliance was rooted in her suspicion and hatred for Bortei, but he was also aware that it was genuine. They spoke to each other occasionally, in short guarded words, but what they said was heavy with meaning and anxiety.
“Jamuga Sechen,” she said one day, “be on thy guard. Thou hast a most vicious enemy, Bortei, wife of my son. She will not rest until she hath destroyed thee.”
“I know,” he said, in a low voice. But in his own mind he discounted the power of Bortei, for all her three sons.
“What I tell Temujin in the day is destroyed at night,” she observed.
“Temujin believeth nothing but what he desireth to believe,” said Jamuga, sadly. But in fact, he felt little disturbance with regard to his own relationship with Temujin, for the young khan showed him, these days, nothing but friendliness.
“I will give thee advice, Jamuga: hold thy tongue. Whatsoever Temujin doeth, do not cross him. Assent by silence, if thou canst not with words.”
But this Jamuga found it impossible to do. His inner tortured drive forced bitter words to his tongue; had he not spoken he would not have had even a small peace. He expelled protests as a volcano expels spent fire and steam, lest it explode all at once, and destroy itself. What Kurelen had given him to read a long time ago had stiffened the bewildered integrity in him, so that he knew that a man’s life was a small price to pay for his peace.
Temujin had great religious tolerance, and one of the major crimes he would not countenance was any strife among the religious groups that formed his people. Once a Moslem had taken violent issue with a Christian, and both had drawn sabers and were trying to kill each other with immense heartiness. He had taken up a club, stepped between them for all the flashing steel, and had beaten both into insensibility. In fact, the Moslem died the next day from his injuries.
“In the cause of unity, there must be peace between religions,” he said. “He who doth quarrel because of his gods shall go to them with dispatch and there settle the argument.” He added: “A leader who doth stir up religious strife among his people, or doth countenance it, is no true leader, but a quarrelsome and stupid woman doomed to death.”
Jamuga would have approved of this religious tolerance and equality, had he not known that in truth Temujin cared nothing for real tolerance, but only for unity among the many different peoples who now formed his tribe. When they quarrelled about their doctrines, they deprecated his supremity and their own loyalty to him. This he would not allow, and death or the next severest punishment was his law.
“Serve your gods in your souls, but serve me first in your arms,” he said. “He who sayeth his god is the only true god, and so sfirreth up dissension, hath done me an unforgivable injury.”
So when the Moslems knelt down to pray at sunset, he commanded that the Christians kneel also, and his own people, and the Taoists and Buddhists. “Prayers in unity do no harm,” he said, but he commanded that the Moslems whisper their invocation: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet,” so that the others would not overhear it. When the Christians began their celebrations of the Mass, he commanded the’ Moslems to stand near-by and observe it with reverence, saying: “There is but one God of all men, and answereth to all names, as a woman answereth to the many endearments of her husband, remaining always the same woman.”
The Earth Is the Lord's Page 46