In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  I ventured out gingerly in her wake. As the cows were brought into the milking parlour, the field gate was left open and two vast Ardennes mares took their chance to stroll in from their field looking for pickings. They plodded into the farmyard like amiable leviathans, unstoppable as they pushed their way into the barn to munch on the straw. One of them somehow managed to get herself astraddle a large rusty metal hopper, which would have taken three or four men to budge. The mare simply sent the obstacle skidding out of her way with a gentle push of a leg. Her companion must have been irritated by a fly, for she stamped her foot, and with awe I noted how the hoof had gouged a pock mark out of the hardpacked earth and stones as if the ground had been struck by a navvy wielding a sledge hammer. From time to time, as Charlie had warned, the two animals broke wind thunderously until interrupted by Cecile who bobbed back into view and gave several piercing cries of outrage so that the two horses turned slowly and walked majestically back to their field with all the unhurried certainty of a fleet of merchantmen at sea.

  Nailed above the rickety barn door, by my count, were 55 prize metal plaques awarded at various horse shows for different categories of prize Heavy Horses, stallions, mares, foals, mares-with-foals, yearlings, and so forth. I feared the weight of any more plaques would bring down the rickety building in the next gale. The winners of the plaques and their progeny were scattered over the wide pastureland surrounding the farm, contentedly grazing. From a distance, they looked like hippopotami on the veldt, particularly the more pregnant mares. The fields were very big, running right up to the surrounding forest. Occasionally a Heavy Horse would emerge from the trees, its arrival heralded by a series of crashes and cracks as the creature simply shoved its way through the saplings like an earthmover. I was joined by Cecile and we strolled through the herd. Getting precise information from her was baffling. How many horses did she have on the farm? She didn't know precisely. What was the best age for a horse to go on a very long journey? There was a shrug — 'a certain age'. How much time was needed to train an Ardennes horse to the saddle? Again, a shrug. Why did all the horses have docked tails? The response was a bemusing explanation: first, it was the custom, and second, in the old days long tails were a nuisance, always getting entangled in the reins and working machinery. I suspected I got nearer the truth when Cecile cheerfully slapped the nearest horse on its huge rump and announced that the bobbed tail set off its buttock lines very well. I had to admit that for sheer rotundity, little could compete with the full billowing stern of a plump Ardennes Horse. Whereas Charlie had owned just a few animals, and trained and worked with them, Cecile raised dozens and dozens which drifted about the farm, simply growing up. She knew the name, lineage and age of every one of them, but though there was fondness there was a pragmatic limit to sentimentality. Mares were kept for breeding purposes, good stallions selected and sold or retained, poor quality animals and surplus stallions fattened up as quickly as possible and then sent to the butcher's hook. In a matter-of-fact tone Cecile told me that a young Ardennes horse would put on edible flesh more quickly than a bullock, and that according to butcher's lore a bay horse gave less stringy steaks than a roan. The Crusaders too, I reflected, had been driven to eat their horses.

  After an hour's stroll we returned to the farmhouse for a tot of a ferocious plum liqueur followed by supper at the long kitchen table with an assortment of companions so strange that they enhanced the sense of being in an earlier part of the century. Half way through our meal a huge black man came staggering in. At first I thought he was a negro and drunk, but he was black with fine dust and lurching from sheer exhaustion, not alcohol. It was Cecile's brother Dédé, who as usual had been driving himself to the point of utter exhaustion, working to keep the farm afloat. He sat down heavily in the chair at the head of the table and barely had time to eat a little food before his head began to droop sleepily.

  I stayed overnight at the farm so was on hand to watch the striking sight of Dédé's first breakfast, a deep bowl of powdered, chicory-flavoured coffee at daybreak, accompanied by a shot of 'le grog', cheap beet-sugar rum. This was reinforced when he reappeared after two hours of back-breaking work with a plate containing four thick slices of pig fat that had simmered in water for half an hour and then been lightly fried. Brimming with cholesterol, Dédé held out an enormous hand to wish me goodbye, and then rushed back to his toil. The previous night I had plucked up enough courage to explain the seemingly preposterous idea that I wished to buy one of their horses in order to ride the animal on the medieval road to Jerusalem. I might as well have been suggesting that I would just ride a few hundred metres around the farm. Yes, yes, he nodded and asked if I would like another pastis. Cecile was off to Verdun to run her little shop where on three days a week she sold a few pints of milk and eggs, and she was equally off-hand. There would be no problem, she said. She would find a quiet animal and when I came back Dédé would train the creature for the saddle. I drove away, wondering if my command of French was less than I had supposed.

  Charlie came to my rescue. He accompanied me on my next visit to Bourbeau a couple of months later, and somehow, through his mangled French delivered in a very English accent, he was always on precisely the right wavelength. The whole family clearly adored him, and there was much banter and discussion of farm quotas, crops, milk yields, as well as the names, characters, colours and pedigrees of famous Ardennes horses. It was like listening to an arcane rite, and I merely eavesdropped as he, Cecile and I walked through all the pastures once again to try to select my horse.

  As we tramped the entire round of the farm, stopping and regarding every horse in sight, I became increasingly worried. Time was running short if I was to train and learn to ride an Ardennes horse and set out in the spring: the season when the prudent medieval traveller began his journey, once the snows had melted and the muddy roads had dried. There was no chance of my going off to look for other horse farms. Bourbeau was my best and only hope. Yet every time our trio halted to inspect an animal, the odds dwindled. For a start it became clear that Cecile would not part with any of the mares, because every one of them was pregnant and carrying a foal. That eliminated ninety per cent of the horses on the farm. Among the stallions the selection was very restricted indeed. Most of them were very young, mere colts and foals, and as such quite unsuitable. There was a superb pair of four-year-olds, which I had admired previously, but they were bespoke and far too fine for what I needed. The same was true of the other stallions: they were either already sold, or spoken for or would be kept on as possible replacements for the stud farm. Perhaps it was accident or, more likely, good stage management, but after two hours walk and inspecting apparently every field, we had not seen a single suitable animal. I was really beginning to wonder whether anyone at Bourbeau had the least idea of what I wanted, or why, or that it mattered so much to me to have a genuine Ardennes for my journey.

  But I need not have been so on edge. Cecile knew exactly what would suit me. She led us behind the farm, down past a spinney to a distant, soggy field containing just one forlorn horse, who looked very lonely. He was a roan, muddy and fat, and comic-looking with his Roman nose.

  Charlie later told me that it was a puzzle to him why this horse had been kept on. Nothing about him was quite right for a fine Ardennes stallion. The head was wrong, the walk odd, the stance slightly askew, the 'conformation', as the horse-judging world called it, was indifferent. But there was no doubt that this particular horse had a strong character of his own — you could see it in the way he held his head and looked at us - and a horse's character, Charlie had told me a long time before, was the most important quality of all. If I was to coax a Heavy Horse into walking across a continent, the animal would need a strong character to withstand the rigours of the journey.

  Quite what sort of a character the horse possessed, there was no way of knowing. And if I had guessed what lay in store, perhaps I would have thought longer before offering to Cecile to buy this, her sole, suitable ho
rse whose grandiloquent name, it turned out, was Quarté de Bourbeau and whose lineage was fully inscribed in the Ardennes stud book as a four-year-old pure bred. Carty, as his name was instantly abbreviated, was to turn out to be stubborn, cunning, brave, greedy, affectionate, destructive, innocent, gentle, full of guile, timid, majestic, squalid, docile, fractious. He would dominate my life for the next twelve months. Like his relatives, he had been born in the foaling bay in the great barn of Bourbeau, with the help of a splendid contraption of which Dédé was very proud. Above the foaling stall was a large metal box bolted to a rafter, and from it extruded a hook. A stout rope was attached to the hook, and at the other end of the rope a broad canvas belt was wrapped around the huge girth of the pregnant Ardennes mare about to produce her foal in the stall below. On the most likely night for the birth, either Dédé or Cecile would sleep on a mattress in the stable ready to assist the mare in labour. When the mare was ready, she would lie down on the straw. This pulled on the canvas belt which tugged on the rope which pulled on the hook which in turn activated a Second World War klaxon that began hooting and roused the sleeper. Thus, Carty had been born in the middle of the night to the raucous howls of a machine normally associated with war and destruction. Nothing, I was to find out, could have been more appropriate. The world had been alerted to the fact that Carty, rascal extraordinary, had arrived.

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  Table of Contents

  1 - In the Year of the Horse

  2 - Heartland

  3 - The Secret History

  4 - Arat

  5 - Mountain of the Shaman Spirit

  6 - The Three Manly Sports

  7 - Leaving Erdenzu

  8 - A Hundred Remounts

  9 - Crossing the Hangay Massif

  10 - Cattle-herders

  11 - The Lamas of Mandal

  12 - The Sage

  13 - Eagle Hunters

  14 - The Black Death

  15 - Shamaness

  16 - The Eternal Icon

  Chapter Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Photographs

  Extract from Crusader: In Search of Jerusalem by Tim Severin