by Joshua Fogel
Chinggis remained silent for a moment, but eventually he said:
“Fine, I shall grant your wish. You shall be with me when we invade India.”
Chinggis thus decided to adopt Qulan’s idea, which had gotten under his skin in a manner altogether different from the words of Daoist master Changchun or Yelü Chucai. The desire to return home disappeared for a time from Chinggis’s mind, and in its stead a violent urge filled his entire body.
Chinggis felt compelled to follow Qulan’s suggestion because he knew that she wished to give up her own young life to his hegemonic conquests. Although she did wish to see Mount Burqan, Qulan had no desire for a triumphal return there. That was something for Börte and the various descendants to whom she had given birth. Qulan sought to invest the meaning of her life as a concubine in an altogether different place.
Chinggis soon set to work on preparations to invade India again. His plan, though, could not soon be realized. Cha’adai and Ögedei had left Chinggis’s main camp the previous year in the region near Bukhara and were carrying out a separate strategy. Chinggis had had to send a messenger to tell them to return posthaste to the encampment along the Syr Darya. Messengers were also sent to his eldest son, Jochi, on the Kipchak plain and to the base of Jebe and Sübe’etei, the two leaders of the possessed Mongol wolf pack, ordering them all to return.
Cha’adai and Ögedei arrived within about three weeks with their forces, but the return of the detachments under Jochi, Jebe, and Sübe’etei, located far away, required considerably more time. Chinggis set summer for Jochi’s return and the end of autumn for Jebe and Sübe’etei’s.
Chinggis spent the summer season hunting in the mountainous region to the north. This was needed both for the continued training of his troops and to keep up morale. At summer’s end, he again moved camp to the bank of the Syr Darya. One day a messenger from Jochi arrived to report that not a single wild animal was left on the Kipchak plain and he was pursuing them farther upstream on the Syr Darya as a memento for the great khan.
Although he had not seen or held Jochi’s gift in his hands, Chinggis was extremely pleased. Half a month prior to the predetermined day, Chinggis dispatched about 30,000 troops to the upper reaches of the Syr Darya to receive Jochi’s present. In early autumn they had hunted wild boar, horses, oxen, deer, and all manner of other animals in fields by the Syr Darya. There was a herd of several hundred head of wild animals and a large drove of wild rabbits filling the fields like ground beetles, making an extraordinary sound. Chinggis was duly stunned as never before by Jochi’s performance, ranging over thousands of miles.
Hunting was unfolding on a grand scale heretofore unknown, a virtually daily war between man and beast across the upper reaches of the Syr Darya. When the hunt was over, though, neither Jochi nor any of his men were to be seen. Two messengers arrived to report that Jochi had fallen ill during the hunt and had withdrawn to his Kipchak camp. Chinggis immediately dispatched a messenger with orders for Jochi to return to base camp despite his illness. Chinggis now became furious that, in spite of such stark instructions, not one man had returned to service.
That autumn Chinggis received news that Muqali, commander of the expeditionary army against the state of Jin, had died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-three. Chinggis felt as though his own right arm had been suddenly torn off. Having given over responsibility for pacifying the Jin to Muqali, Chinggis had not had to be the least bit concerned on that front, and he had been free to devote his energies to the attack on Khorazm. His dismay was thus great.
He had his entire army fall in line by their barracks and there announced Muqali’s death. He ordered all officers and men to observe one month’s mourning:
“Commander Muqali, in whom I held the greatest trust, has died. Had he had but six months more, Muqali might have been able to replace the Jin with his own kingdom.”
Unable to speak further, Chinggis stepped down from the podium. He had planned to praise Muqali’s achievements, but he felt as though these great deeds could not be sufficiently esteemed in words. That day Chinggis summoned only commanders Bo’orchu and Jelme to his tent, and together they grieved over Muqali’s death. The import of this was that he and Bo’orchu and Jelme were the only men who appreciated how great and fine a man Muqali had been.
At sixty-one, Bo’orchu was the same age as Chinggis; Jelme was sixty-four. Two years earlier, Jelme had become paralyzed through half of his body, and his speech was not at all clear. Bo’orchu had been sick since the previous spring, his spirit weakened as well. As he stood before Chinggis now, tears welled up in both of his eyes.
When Chinggis said that they were ultimately the only ones who knew of Muqali’s greatness and after them it would all be buried and gone, Jelme waved his hand furiously as if to disagree and said something, but neither Chinggis nor Bo’orchu could understand him clearly. Several times, Chinggis held his ear close to Jelme’s mouth, and finally he was able to comprehend what Jelme was trying to say:
“No, it’s not just the three of us. Muqali’s greatness is known to everyone in the state of Jin.”
Late that year, messengers from Jebe and Sübe’etei arrived at Chinggis’s camp near Samarkand.
“The two army units have invaded Russia, dealt a crushing blow to the allied princes of Russia at the Kalka River, turned southern Russia into a battlefield with fire and flowing blood, appeared at the Dnieper River, and then ridden on farther to the coast of the Azov Sea.”
While clearly Mongol soldiers themselves, the messengers had an odd appearance. They were wearing narrow pants clinging tightly to their legs and neckerchiefs around their heads. Wine and extraordinary items made of glass were to be found in their saddlebags. Several dozen crosses taken in plunder were attached to their saddles. They merely reported on the movement of troops but had no response at all to Chinggis’s orders for those troops to return to camp.
8
Return to Mount Burqan
IN EARLY 1224, CHINGGIS ANNOUNCED to his entire army his plan to launch an attack against India. The grand design was to traverse either the Hindukush or the Qara-Qorum range, enter India, conquer the major Indian strongholds, and when the fighting came to an end, attempt to return to the Mongolian plateau by way of Tibet. Neither Chinggis nor any of his commanders could surmise how many months or years it might take to achieve these ends.
When the forthcoming battle was announced, a number of army units began to organize themselves into heavy and light units. Numerous captives of many different ethnicities were ordered to work from morning till night for a month to turn unhulled rice into polished rice and to repair armor. To cross over great mountain ranges and immense rivers, Mongol soldiers had to work daily at new exercises involving the felling of trees, fording of rivers, and building of bridges.
In early spring the Mongol forces divided into several units and set out from the Syr Darya camp. Prior to departure, Chinggis sent couriers to Jebe and Sübe’etei, who had not followed his orders and were marching far away on foreign terrain, and to his eldest son, Jochi, who had similarly ignored his orders and remained on the Kipchak plain. The task of these couriers was to inform them all of the new battle plans and to convey orders to the effect that they should bring whatever fighting they were presently pursuing to a close and return home.
After the Mongol armies had marched for over a month, they could see in the distance the apex of the Qara-Qorum Mountains, like the blade of a saw, which they would have to traverse. After roughly another month or more, they pushed their way through the mountains. These rugged mountains soared into the sky, and dense forests grew luxuriantly around them. When the soldiers had crossed these endless forests, they came to snow-capped peaks, and after they had crossed the peaks, more densely wooded areas obstructed the view of their objective. In only a short period of time, men and horses alike were thoroughly exhausted.
While the troops were camped in a small village in the mountains, Qulan passed away. Chinggis knew full w
ell when they left the banks of the Syr Darya that she did not have long to live. When he received news that Qulan’s condition had become grave, Chinggis visited her yurt. She lay with her thin, waxen, almost transparent arms and legs spread across her bed. As he approached, she opened her closed eyes as if she had been waiting for this moment. Her eyes struck Chinggis as much larger than he remembered. Although there was a fire burning inside the yurt, the cold of the dead of winter filled the air. Qulan was near death. A low, clear sound resembling nothing like a human voice emanated from her lips:
“Under the ice.”
After she had said this, a faint smile floated over her face as she tried to reach her hand in Chinggis’s direction. The hand, though, had to abandon its effort midway. Chinggis swallowed and then watched as this woman, whom he had loved more than any other and who had given him her love in a way no other woman had ever expressed it, was about to breathe her last before his eyes.
Qulan’s last words, “under the ice,” seemed to Chinggis to mean the site she wished for her burial. As he had once forbidden his son Cha’adai from mourning his own son’s death, Chinggis would not allow himself now to mourn the passing of Qulan. He had so ordered himself days and weeks prior to her actual death.
Soon thereafter Qulan stopped breathing, and when her death was announced by a Persian doctor, Chinggis left her yurt. Inasmuch as he forbid himself from mourning, it would not do for him to show sadness at her death. He would carry out her funeral and have her remains buried beneath the glacial ice. This would be the final act he performed for his beloved who had now departed. He decided that night to have an altar erected in her yurt, convey the news of her death to his top commanders, and have them attend at the ceremony bidding her farewell.
That ceremony was carried out in the cold, when it seemed as if dawn itself was frozen. Before the night had given way to light, the coffin had been removed from the campsite. Some thirty commanders who had known her well carried the coffin in turns, with roughly an equal number of soldiers joining in the funeral procession. That day the procession passed through low, densely grown shrubbery, and gradually by nightfall they reached a desolate ravine shut off by snow and ice, where one could not see a single tree or blade of grass.
The following day soldiers found several dozen cracks in the ice over the ravine, and this information was reported to Chinggis. Chinggis inspected every one of them himself and selected the largest rent in the ice for Qulan’s grave. Tilting it to the right and left, four young Uyghurs slowly lowered her coffin to a considerable depth in the frost. When the cord they were using to hold and lower the coffin ran out, the young men opened their hands in which they had been holding it. Did the coffin stop somewhere on the way down, or did it sink to some unknown depth? They heard a single cold, grating, metallic sound and nothing thereafter.
With the coffin now under the ice, the entire party, fearing a change of weather, immediately left the grave site. About halfway back on their return, they completed their nonstop descent of the mountain as the wind began howling.
Despite the ban he placed on himself from mourning Qulan’s death, Chinggis could do nothing about the blow he felt in his heart. As they marched through mountainous terrain that would continue for an indefinite period of time, Chinggis no longer understood why they were invading India. The invasion had been planned at the suggestion of Qulan, and from his perspective, he set out with a desire to find for her a place to die.
Chinggis had no choice but to station troops in the village where Qulan died for a month to carry out the appropriate religious rituals for his beloved concubine. During that time, he had a most extraordinary dream. It took place at daybreak, and in it Chinggis saw a deerlike animal appear at his bedside. At first he thought it was a deer, but on close inspection he saw that it was not, as its tail resembled that of a horse, its hair was green in color, its head had a single horn, and it spoke human language. As the animal bent its forelegs and sat down by Chinggis’s bedside, out of the blue it said to him: “You must lose no time getting your army together and return to your own land.” Having spoken, the animal stood up and left the tent. Although it was clearly a dream, the genuineness of the animal’s deportment and the way it entered and left his tent made it seem very real.
The following day, Chinggis summoned Yelü Chucai and asked him what the dream might have meant.
“The animal,” replied Chucai, “is known as a jiaoduan in Chinese, and it is conversant in all languages. It ordinarily appears in a chaotic period full of the horror of bloodshed. The jiaoduan probably appeared before the great khan at the will of heaven.”
Chinggis’s usual practice was not to take Yelü Chucai at his word. He listened silently to what this young man of learning whom he so liked had to say, but never simply accepted what he heard. This occasion was different.
“Then,” said the great khan, “we shall obey the words of the jiaoduan.”
The light in the jiaoduan’s pupils seemed to Chinggis to resemble the light in Qulan’s eyes. Perhaps, he thought, Qulan had transformed into the animal known as the jiaoduan and come explicitly to warn him.
That very day orders were issued to form up ranks in the army, and two days later the Mongolian military units set their sights on Peshawar. All of his commanders had understood that the invasion of India would be a fight that would require great effort and bring few results. Therefore, a change in plans was met happily by all.
Chinggis went through Peshawar, crossed the Khyber Pass, and pitched camp for the summer at Baghlan. While encamped there, he came to the firm decision to return his entire army to the Mongolian plateau. Once before Chinggis had made such a mental decision, but it had been cut short by the Indian campaign. Since breaking camp at Mount Burqan in the spring of 1219, Chinggis had spent five years treading over foreign soil. It was time now to enable his men who had been fighting throughout these years to set foot on their native land and to give solace to their rough and hardened minds.
At the end of the summer, Chinggis set off from Baghlan in a northerly direction. His aim was to assemble his troops at Samarkand and from there begin a proper march back home. When passing near the city of Bukhara en route earlier, he had learned of the rebellious sentiments of the populace there. Chinggis sent a military unit in to slaughter them. The troops forded the Amu Darya several times and entered Bukhara, the first city in the state of Khorazm that Chinggis had had burned to the ground to show that any hostile actions against his army would incur serious consequences. The great majority of the men had been murdered, and those who survived had been drafted into his army. All of the virgins had been abducted, and the city, emptied of its people, had been set ablaze and literally reduced to ashes.
In the more than four years since then, Bukhara, just like Samarkand, was beginning to form into a new city and prospering. Just as before, people thronged it, and all manner of men and women were buying and selling goods, calling out, eating, and moving around in all directions. Only the ruins of the former city walls encircling it remained now, as remnants from a nightmare of several days’ duration.
The large Mongol unit took a long time to march straight through the city from south to north. There was no look of fear on the faces of the inhabitants. There was no expression of warm greeting to the Mongols either. Most faces betrayed no emotion at all. As had been the case in Samarkand, Bukhara had now become home to a wide mixture of ethnic groups. These included Han Chinese, Khitans, Tanguts, Turks, Persians, and Arabs, and mixed in among them all was a small number of occupying Mongol soldiers.
In Chinggis’s eyes, even the Mongol soldiers—his subordinates, to be sure—bore exactly the same expression, inasmuch as they were now mixed with these many different ethnicities. There was no hint of exuberance in welcoming their own kinsmen, just apathy. Chinggis was thus unable to feel the least sense of victory here. These thronging young men and women were not a conquered people. They were neither enemy nor ally. Should he feel concerned in t
he least that they were a threat to his life, every one of them would instantly turn into his enemy. Chinggis realized that, even with a great massacre, there were some things that he had been unable to change. Killing a large number of people to no purpose and destroying a walled city merely scattered unhappiness and sorrow.
Chinggis and his troops marched another five days from Bukhara to Samarkand. He planned to spend the winter there and the following spring proceed to the Mongolian plateau. Thus, the four winter months they were to stay became in effect the last Mongol military encampment in the state of Khorazm. In fact, it was less than an encampment, for only a small number of troops could actually be placed within the city. The residents overflowed and lived in close proximity to their neighbors, with the population now several times more numerous than before the great massacre. There was simply not enough room for the Mongol armies.
A number of units set up camps in the areas adjacent to the city. The soldiers, both Mongols and those from many foreign lands who had been taken captive, went into the city when they had free time. With its throngs of people and resultant chaos, Samarkand was like a beehive of activity.
During this period, Chinggis only rarely set foot in Samarkand. Whenever there were banquets, he held them in his tent, and whenever he wanted to see shows, acrobatic performances, or theatrics, the performers were summoned to him. Next to his own camp, Cha’adai, Ögedei, Tolui, Qasar, Belgütei, and others pitched tents, but he never put in an appearance there. Only once, though, on a whim he made a round of inspection of them all.
In every tent, Chinggis saw spectacles he could scarcely believe. Although their living quarters were shaped like yurts, firm buildings constructed on the inside with brick and stone had been built, with fancy stoves, luxurious beds, and magnificent chairs and tables for visitors. Amid this stunning furniture were bottles of wine and crystal glasses. Some had green grass plots inside and beds of flowers blooming everywhere. In addition, numerous ponds had been built with spouting water.