Genghis’s eldest son Jochi was the only general ever to turn against him. He took his men and refused to return home. Though it is well recorded, a writer of historical fiction sometimes has to explain how something like that could happen. His men would have left wives and children behind, and that seems extraordinary to modern sensibilities. Could he have truly been so charismatic? It may seem like an odd example, but I recalled the cult leader David Koresh, whose followers were killed in a siege in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Before the end, he had taken the wives of married followers to his own bed. Not only did the husbands not object, they even accepted his ruling that they would no longer lie with their wives themselves. That is the power of a charismatic leader. For those of us who do not command that sort of loyalty, men like Nelson, Caesar, and Genghis must always be something of a mystery. The exact manner of Jochi’s death remains unknown, though if it was at the order of his father, it would not have been recorded. The timing is, however, suspiciously convenient. It suited Genghis very well that the only man to betray him died shortly after taking his men north. We can be certain Genghis would not have employed assassins, but that is all.
The name of Tolui’s wife, Sorhatani, is one of those with many spelling variations. The most accurate is probably “Sorkhakhtani,” but I rejected that as too hard on the eye—and the “k” sounds would have been pronounced as “h” anyway. In a similar spirit, I have used the old-fashioned spelling of “Moslem” throughout, though “Muslim” is now the accepted form. Sorhatani plays only a small part in this book, but as mother to Mongke and Kublai, she had a huge influence over the future of the Mongol nation. As a Christian, she was one of those to influence Genghis’s grandsons, and yet she allowed Yao Shu, a Buddhist, to become Kublai’s mentor. Between them, they would create a man who embraced Chinese culture as Genghis never could.
Jelaudin gathered approximately sixty thousand men to his banners after his father’s death. Cut off from his own lands, he must also have been an extraordinary leader. At the valley of Panjshir in Afghanistan, he forced a Mongol army into retreat across a river. Underestimating him, Genghis sent only three tumans to crush the rebellion. For the only time in Genghis’s life, his army was routed by them. In just one year, the aura of invincibility he had worked so hard to create had been shattered. Genghis himself took the field with everything he had. He moved his men so quickly that they could not cook food, catching up with Jelaudin at last on the banks of the river Indus in what is now Pakistan. Genghis trapped the prince’s army against the banks. I have not continued Jelaudin’s story here, but after surviving the battle on the Indus, he made his way across Iran to Georgia, Armenia, and Kurdistan, gathering followers until he was murdered in 1231. It was his army that overran Jerusalem without him, so that it remained under Muslim control until 1917.
The man who fell from the walls at Herat is a peculiar part of the histories. The abandoned fortress city still stands today, much as I have described it. Genghis did indeed spare the man, astonished that he could have survived such a fall. As with so many other times, Genghis the man was quite different from Genghis the ruthless khan. As a man, he enjoyed displays of courage, as when Jelaudin took his horse over a sheer drop. As khan, Genghis ordered the slaughter of every living thing in Herat, knowing that it would send a message to all those who thought his control had been shaken by Jelaudin’s rebellion. The killing at Herat was his last major action in Afghanistan. Like that city, the Chinese region of Xi Xia thought the Mongols were too stretched to defend distant outposts, so stopped sending tribute. Their refusal would bring the khan out of Arab lands at last, intent on resuming the utter subjugation of the Chin empire, begun more than a decade before.
In 1227, only twelve years after taking Yenking in 1215, Genghis Khan was dead. He spent about eight of those twelve years at war. Even when there was no obvious enemy, his generals were always on the move, reaching as far as Kiev in Russia, where Tsubodai made the only successful winter attack in history. Of all Genghis’s generals, Tsubodai is rightly known as the most gifted. I have barely done him justice here.
Genghis died after falling from his horse in the process of attacking the Xi Xia for a second time. His last command was to wipe out Xi Xia. There is a persistent legend that the Great Khan was stabbed by a woman before that last ride. As he was on his way to destroy Xi Xia, it made sense to give that role to the princess he had taken as his wife. Given that his birthdate can only be estimated, he was between fifty and sixty years old. For such a short life, and from such humble beginnings, he left an incredible mark on the world. His immediate legacy was that his sons did not tear the nation to pieces in deciding who should lead. They accepted Ogedai as khan. Perhaps there would have been civil war if Jochi had still been alive, but he was gone.
The army of Genghis Khan was organized in tens upwards, with a rigid chain of command.
arban: ten men—with two or three gers between them if traveling
fully equipped
jagun: one hundred men
minghaan: one thousand men
tuman: ten thousand men
Commanders of one thousand and ten thousand were given the rank of noyan, though I used “minghaan” and “general” for simplicity. Above those, men like Jebe and Tsubodai were orloks, or eagles, the equivalent of field marshals.
It is interesting to note that although Genghis had little use for gold, plaques of the substance known as paitze became the symbol of rank for his armies and administration. Jagun officers carried one of silver, but noyans carried one weighing approximately twenty ounces of gold. An orlok would have carried one weighing fifty ounces.
At the same time, the growth of army organization, field weapons, and messenger routes required a quartermaster type of rank to come into existence. These were known as yurtchis. They chose campsites and organized the messengers across thousands of miles between armies. The most senior yurtchi was responsible for reconnaissance, intelligence, and the day-to-day running of the camp of Genghis.
Finally, for those who might want to learn more about Genghis and those who followed him, I recommend the wonderful John Man book Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection; The Mongol Warlords by David Nicolle; The Devil’s Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe by James Chambers; Jenghiz Khan by C. C. Walker; and of course The Secret History of the Mongols (original author unknown, though I used an edition translated by Arthur Waley).
Khan: Empire of Silver is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Conn Iggulden
All rights reserved.
Jacket art: Steve Stone
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33973-1
www.bantamdell.com
Title-page and part-title art: Silhouette Mongolian Warriors
by Murat Besler for Shutterstock Images
Cover design: Scott Biel.
Cover illustration: Mike Bryan
v3.1
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Khan: Empire of Silver
Copyright
Dedication
Family Tree
Prologue
Part I - A.D. 1230
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part II - A.D. 1232
&nbs
p; Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Part III - A.D. 1240
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Epilogue
Historical Note
To Katie Espiner
PROLOGUE
He trudged through a landscape of gers, like grubby shells on the shore of some ancient sea. Poverty was all around him: in the yellowing felt, patched and repaired endlessly over generations. Scrawny kid goats and sheep ran bleating around his feet as he approached his home. Batu stumbled over the animals, cursing as water slopped from the heavy buckets. He could smell pungent urine in the air, a sourness that had been missing from the breeze over the river. Batu frowned to himself at the thought of the day he had spent digging a toilet pit for his mother. He had been as excited as a child when he showed the results of his labor. She had merely shrugged, saying she was too old to go so far in the night, when good ground was all around her.
She was thirty-six years old, already broken by sickness and the years passing. Her teeth had rotted in her lower jaw and she walked like a woman twice her age, bent over and limping. Yet she was still strong enough to slap him on the rare occasions Batu mentioned his father. The last time had been just that morning, before he began the trek to the river.
At the door of her ger, he eased the buckets down and rubbed his sore hands, listening. Inside, he could hear her humming some old song from her youth, and he smiled. Her anger would have vanished as quickly as always.
He was not afraid of her. In the last year, he had grown in height and strength to the point where he could have stopped every blow, but he did not. He bore them without understanding her bitterness. He knew he could have held her hands, but he did not want to see her weep—or worse, to see her beg or barter a skin of airag to ease her misery. He hated those times, when she used the drink to hammer herself into oblivion. She told him then that he had his father’s face and that she could not bear to look at him. There had been many days when he had cleaned her himself, her arms flopping over his back, her flat breasts against his chest as he used a cloth and bucket to scrub the filth from her skin. He had sworn many times he would never touch airag himself. Her example made even the smell of it hard on his stomach. When its sweetness was combined with vomit, sweat, and urine, it made him retch.
Batu looked up when he heard the horses, grateful for anything that would keep him outside a little longer. The group of riders was small by the standards of a tuman, barely twenty horsemen. To a boy brought up on the edges of the camp, it was a glorious sight for a morning, a different world.
The warriors rode with very straight backs, and from a distance, they seemed to radiate strength and authority. Batu envied them, even as he ached to be one of their number. Like any other boy of the gers, he knew that their red and black armor meant they were Ogedai’s own Guard, the elite warriors of the tumans. Stories of their battles were sung or chanted on feast days, as well as darker tales of betrayal and blood. Batu winced at the thought. His father featured in some of those, which prompted sidelong glances at his mother and her bastard son.
Batu hawked and spat on the ground at his feet. He could still remember when his mother’s ger had been of the finest white felt and gifts had arrived almost daily. He supposed she had once been beautiful, her skin fresh with youth, where now it was seamed and coarse. Those had been different days, before his father had betrayed the khan and been butchered for it like a lamb in the snow. Jochi. He spat again at the word, the name. If his father had bent to the will of the great khan, Batu thought he might have been one of the warriors in red and black, riding tall among the filthy gers. Instead, he was forgotten and his mother wept whenever he talked of joining a tuman.
Almost all the young men of his age had joined, except for those with injuries or defects of birth. His friend Zan was one, a mixed-blood Chin who had been born with a sightless white eye. No one-eyed man could ever be an archer, and the warriors had turned him away with kicks and laughter, telling him to tend his flocks. Batu had drunk airag for the first time with him that night and been sick for two days. The recruiters had not come for him either, not with the betrayer’s blood running in his veins. Batu had seen them out looking for strong lads, but when their gaze passed over him, they shrugged and turned away. He was as tall and strong as his father had been, but they did not want him.
With a shock, Batu realized the riders were not passing through. He watched as they stopped to speak to one of his mother’s neighbors, and he took a sharp breath in amazement as the old man pointed in Batu’s direction. The horsemen trotted toward him and he stood rooted, watching as they came closer. He found he did not know what to do with his hands and folded them over his chest twice before letting them dangle. From inside the ger, he heard his mother calling some question, but he did not reply. He could not. He had seen the man riding at the head of the group.
There were no pictures in the poor gers, though one or two Chin paintings had found their way into the homes of the wealthiest families. Yet Batu had seen his father’s brother once. On a feast day years before, he had crept up close, peering between warriors for a sight of the great khan. Ogedai and Jochi had been with Genghis then, and time had not faded the bright memory, among the most bittersweet in all his young years. It had been a glimpse of the life he might have had, before his father threw it all away for some petty squabble Batu did not even understand.
Ogedai rode bareheaded, in armor lacquered shining black. He wore his hair in the Chin style, as a heavy rope falling from a topknot on a bare, shaved scalp. Batu drank in every detail of the man as his mother’s voice called plaintively again from inside. He could see that the great khan’s son was looking directly at him and speaking, but Batu was tongue-tied, dumb. The yellow eyes were bright up close, and he was lost in the realization that he was staring at his uncle by blood.
“Is he slow-witted?” one of the warriors said. Batu shut his open mouth. “My lord Ogedai is speaking to you, boy. Are you deaf?”
Batu found himself flushing with great heat. He shook his head, suddenly irritated to have such men ride up to his mother’s ger. What would they think of the patched walls, the smell, the flies in the air? It was humiliating and his shock turned quickly to anger. Even then, he did not reply. Men like these had killed his father, his mother said. The life of a ragged son would mean little to them.
“Have you no voice at all?” Ogedai said. He was smiling at something and Batu responded crookedly.
“I have,” he said. He saw one of the warriors reach down, but he did not expect a blow and he staggered a step as a mailed glove connected with the side of his head.
“I have, my lord,” the warrior said without heat.
Batu shrugged as he straightened up. His ear was burning, but he’d known worse.
“I have a voice, my lord,” he said, doing his best to remember the warrior’s face.
Ogedai discussed him as if he wasn’t present. “It wasn’t just a story then. I can see my brother in his face, and he’s already as tall as my father. How old are you, boy?”
Batu stood very still, trying to collect himself. Some part of him had always wondered if his mother had been exaggerating his father’s position. To have it confirmed so casually was more than he could take in.
/> “Fifteen years,” he said. He saw the warrior begin to lean forward again and added “my lord” quickly. The warrior leaned back in his saddle and nodded to him complacently.
Ogedai frowned. “You’re old to be starting out. Training should begin at seven or eight at the latest, if you’re ever to draw a good bow.” He saw Batu’s confusion and smiled, pleased to be able to do such a thing. “Still, I will be watching you. Report to General Jebe tomorrow. He has his camp about a hundred miles to the north, near a village by a cliff. You can find it?”
“I have no horse, my lord,” Batu said.
Ogedai glanced at the warrior who had struck him, and the man raised his eyes to heaven before dismounting. He passed the reins into Batu’s hands.
“Can you ride at least?” the warrior said.
Batu was awed as he took the reins and patted the muscular neck. He had never touched an animal as fine.
“Yes. Yes, I can ride.”
“Good. This mare is not your horse, understand? She will carry you to your post, but then you will take some old swayback and return her to me.”
“I don’t know your name,” Batu said.
“Alkhun, boy. Ask anyone in Karakorum and they’ll know me.”
“The city?” Batu asked. He had heard of the stone thing rising from the soil on the back of a million workers, but until then, he had not believed it.
“More a camp than a city at the moment, though that is changing,” Alkhun confirmed. “You can send the horse by the way-station riders, but tell them to go easy with her. I’ll take any whip marks out of your hide. Oh, and welcome to the army, boy. My lord Ogedai has plans for you. Don’t disappoint him.”
ONE
The Khan Series 5-Book Bundle: Genghis: Birth of an Empire, Genghis: Bones of the Hills, Genghis: Lords of the Bow, Khan: Empire of Silver, Conqueror Page 130