Mongol

Mongol

My name is TEMUJIN.

I am telling you this because you know me by another name. More of that later.

My story will unfold before you. It is important that you pay attention. I am writing this account to set the record straight. History remembers me as a tyrant, as a monster.

I am neither.

In 1165, I was born on the Right Bank of the Onan River. I remember it well. My mother, Ujin, left her husband’s tent and walked down to the riverbank. With a stick between her teeth to bite on when the pain of birth seemed unbearable, she squatted and bore down with the powerful muscles of her womb.

I remember it all.

I was feeling pleasantly relaxed. Lying there cushioned by a warm bath of viscous fluid, occasionally moving my arms and legs (not that I knew then what these appendages were). I was thinking; the time had come for change. I had been basking in this relaxed state, building strength, for some months now. Living in a world of fluid made me a water breather.

Suddenly, the very fluid that supported me all this time disappeared with a rush. What a thrill that was. To be relaxed and quiet one moment and then have my environment completely changed just as I was thinking about it. I knew then that my destiny was greatness.

A powerful pressure started at my feet, working along my body, urging me to move downward. When one ripple finished, another, more powerful, took its place. There was no point resisting. I began sliding downwards. Fortunately, there was still enough of a coating on the sides of the chute to allow me to slide smoothly. At one point, I was moving too quickly for my liking, so I grabbed the side of the chute with one of my hands to slow my progress. Suddenly, I burst into bright light. My eyes screwed up with the pain of it. It was a cold and harsh world into which I was born.

My mother cut the cord that connected me to her and then swiftly washed me in the clear water of the Onan River.

That water was icy.

The shock of it forced my body to convulse, expelling a ball of phlegm from my throat, clearing the way for a lusty yell of outrage.

Strange new sensations.

Parts of my body that had appeared to be lifeless suddenly became movable.

Lungs drawing in the cold steppe air.

The ecstasy of breathing.

Becoming an air breather.

The feeling of hunger.

My mother lifted me out of the water and wrapped me in a warm fur. Then she pulled down the top of her shift and poked her nipple at my lips. Instinctively, I sucked on this delicious piece of flesh. To my amazement, a warm liquid squirted into my mouth and down my throat. The taste was incredible. I sucked and sucked until a heavy lassitude overcame me and then I slept.

There was great rejoicing when I was born. My father, Yesugei Baatur, killed some of his sheep and bled one of his horses. The entire tribe feasted on roasted mutton and mares milk mixed with blood.

The tribe’s shaman, summoned for the occasion, said, “My name is Kokchu. I am the tribe’s shaman. It has always been so. It will always be so. This son, born to the clan Borjigid of the tribe Kiyat, comes into the world clenching a clot of blood in his fist. This is a sign from heaven. Tengri, that is heaven, wants us to know that this new son will be courageous and victorious in life. His name shall be Temujin. Now drink, eat and rejoice in the presence of this our new son.”

Aptly named.

Temujin.

Blacksmith.

Only Tengri and Kokchu knew that one-day I would forge a nation.

A nation so large it would cover most of the eastern world.

Page Break

Chapter 1 (Training)

The eagle flew above the treetops, soaring on up-draughts, created by the collision of air against the mountainside. Delicate twitches of tiny feathers at the end of each wing maneuvered the eagle round and round as he watched intently the actions of the people below.

It was twilight’s first gleaming. That transient moment when daylight begins its task of easing the darkness westward. The sky was still black, but the dawn slithered its way across the land, pushing the night before it. Slowly, the night changed from indigo to an insipid gray. Dawn suddenly gathered momentum as the sun burst over the horizon.

There was a hint of mist in the air. The riders, all ten of them, guided their animals down the wooded mountainside towards the cluster of birch bark huts nestled in the tiny valley below.

It was so quiet. The riders could almost hear the faint whistle of the wind through the extended wings of the eagle as it circled above the trees looking for prey. Only the swish of tree branches brushed aside by horse and rider, and the occasional snort of the horses blowing vapor clouds into the cool morning air, heralded the approach of danger.

Leather creaked as the riders settled on hard saddles. Muffled tack deadened the ring of metal hitting metal. Bindings on the horses’ feet prevented the click of iron shoes against rock. It was a peaceful scene. The eagle, the riders, the soft grass underfoot, the pine trees nodding in the early morning breeze and the flat silvery light of another day chasing the night away.

The horsemen were fierce looking.

Weather-beaten faces, burnished by the sun and wrinkled by exposure to the biting winds of the mountaintop. Bedraggled unkempt hair, wispy beards, moth-eaten sheepskin coats, long bows slung carelessly over their backs with sword belts and quiver straps crisscrossed on their chests. To keep the cold out, they wore baggy trousers tied at the waist and ankle with leather thongs. All the riders wore peculiar conical hats formed from horse leather, hardened in urine, then covered with fur. These men dressed warmly, for autumn in the mountains was bitterly cold. They spoke in whispers, their breath pluming in the frosty air.

They had not eaten for several days. Hunger roiled in their bellies, cramping, and gnawing away at their innards. They had survived their thirst by sucking on snow collected on the mountaintop they had been crossing for the last few days. Now they approached the village with stealth.

Temujin hoped there were no dogs in the village. He hated dogs, even feared them. He had gone over his plan with the men just thirty minutes ago at the first hint of smoke tainted air. Where there was smoke, there was fire, and where there was fire, there was man, and where there was man, there was food.

The plan was a simple one. Still, Temujin fretted. Would his men remember the roles they had to play? Would they stick to the plan, or would they fight the way they usually did?

As their leader, Temujin led by strength and cunning. He wanted to try a raid using new tactics that required his men to fight as a team, not as individuals haphazardly slashing their way through the foe.

The plan was a good one.

Two of the riders would limp into the village, walking their horses into the clearing. The rest of the men would wait amongst the trees, forming a half circle around the small cluster of huts. The two-point men would draw the attention of the villagers away from the primary force of raiders and keep them occupied while the others got into the ambush position.

If the villagers were hostile, the point men would run back into the trees, drawing the unsuspecting villagers towards the waiting riders. If the villagers were friendly, then the decoys would occupy them with conversation while the primary force slipped around the village and crept up behind their unsuspecting hosts.

Each man hoped for a good fight.

They had been riding long, and boredom had settled upon them. A good fight might sharpen their hunger, and these miserable villagers would have some stout women tucked away in their huts.

The two-point men dismounted just inside the tree line, then led their horses into the clearing. The horses were stocky plains’ horses, rarely seen around these parts. They plodded behind the men who led them, lending additional illusion to the effect being created.

Wearily, Harholden and Whitehar limped into the glade, heads down, an air of terrible suffering hanging over them. One horse stepped on a dry branch, snapping it with a loud cracking noise. The horse did not rear, trained as it was in the games of war that men played.

The noise was enough to bring a villager stumbling out of his hut to investigate. He took one look at the two warriors and scampered across the clearing towards the warning bell.

As the man was scrabbling for the long wooden clapper, the one with the leather-wrapped stone bound onto the end with thongs, Harholden reached inside his sheepskin coat, drawing the throwing ax he kept there. Harholden’s accuracy with the ax was legendary. He did not seem to aim at all. Just pulled it out and lazily tossed it towards the terrified villager, grinning as he did so. It seemed he could see the exact passage the ax would take through the air on its dreadful flight. It was as if he was guiding it with some mystical power.

The ax flew straight, appearing to be in slow motion as it covered the distance between hand and back. It landed with a soft “thunk,” embedded between the villager’s shoulder blades, just below the neck. Harholden heard the low grunt the villager made as his knees buckled out from under him. As the villager slid to the ground, fingers curling, his outstretched hand brushed the handle of the clapper he had so desperately wanted to reach. It was just nerves. His brain had not realized yet that his body was already dead. This pleased Harholden. His aim still true. The fire raged through his blood. The killing began.

As the lone villager lay felled in the mud under the village bell, Harholden and Whitehar vaulted onto their horses. They galloped straight towards the first bark hut, Harholden swinging low from his saddle to snatch his throwing ax from the back of the still twitching defender. They crashed through the walls of the first hut, stomping over the young boy and the woman who slept there.

The rest of the warriors charged from their hiding places into the clearing, yelling the traditional high-pitched battle cry. This eerie yodeling noise and the thundering of the horses’ hooves brought the rest of the villagers staggering from their huts. Most of them had the wits to scoop up whatever weapons came to hand. Axes, swords, and long handled scythes. They fought bravely but stood no chance against experienced fighting men mounted on such enormous beasts.

There were individual scenes of bravery. Two villagers fought together to pull a warrior from his horse. One stabbed the horse to halt the fearsome charge, while the other pulled the rider from the saddle. Sumput, the downed warrior, lashed out with his sword as he fell and decapitated one villager. The other, swinging his weapon in an uncoordinated frenzy, lopped off Sumput’s left hand at the wrist before taking a fatal sword thrust through the heart.

Quickly, all the village men were disabled. Temujin’s men had perfected the technique of slashing at the back of the knees of a dismounted man. This had the effect of felling the enemy immediately, to be killed by a cut to the head by either ax or sword.

After rounding up the scattering women and children, the raiders tied them all together with leather ropes. Then Temujin’s men then set about killing all the wounded village men who had survived the onslaught. Temujin intervened and stopped the killing of a slightly addled villager who had “eyes of fire” and commanded this young man to be roped together with the women and children.

After the killing, the ten men gathered around the village meeting-square to assess their wounds. Sumput was the worst of the wounded; the rest only had nicks and bruises. The warriors poked at Sumput and made fun of him for being bested by mere villagers. Temujin was furious at the loss of a horse.

At a nod from Temujin, the group’s shaman Kokchu, went about his preparations for dealing with Sumput. First, he made a fire and stoked it until it burned furiously. Then he went to his saddlebags and poked through his private hoard of special herbs and salves until he found the correct items to treat the wound.

When he was ready, and the fire was hot enough, he had Sumput sit on a log with four warriors to hold him still. Next, the shaman performed his magical dance. Round and round he went, skipping in and out of the fire’s smoky wreaths, muttering unintelligible gibberage to the gods of healing. He himself did not believe in the nonsense of gods, but other men did, and they expected him to call on some supreme intervention to make sure the healing was good. They wanted more of a ritual than the actual placing of medicines and bandages on wounds.

After he was sure the warriors were suitably impressed with his rapport with the gods, Kokchu moved towards Sumput. Grasping Sumput’s left arm, he tucked it under his own right shoulder and trimmed the ragged stump with his specially sharpened healing knife. Kokchu favored his left hand, another sign of his affinity with the gods. Sumput bore this pain with a stolid indifference. He knew the greater pain was yet to come.

When he finished with the trimming, Kokchu told the four warriors holding Sumput to bring him to the fire. Sumput put up a valiant fight but was no match for his wardens. The shaman plunged Sumput’s left arm into the heart of the fire, thus cauterizing the stump. Sumput’s scream was thin and reedy, like the shriek of a young virgin being raped by soldiers victorious in battle.

A plume of steam hissed into the air as the fire vaporized the blood seeping from the stump. The sickly-sweet smell of roasting human flesh permeated the village. Sumput fainted from pain. Kokchu quickly applied some of his special salve to the stump and sprinkled a selection of herbs and leaves on it. The next step was to cut the thong that Sumput had tied around his arm to stop himself bleeding to death and replace it with a leather bag that Kokchu bound onto the stump. He had to make fine adjustments to ensure that the end of the bag did not rub on the roasted flesh. Sumput’s arm then needed tying across his belly, immobilizing it and preventing him from banging the stump and re-opening the wound.

Temujin stood watching this with impatient anger.

“Piss on a stick.” he cursed to his friend Harholden.

Harholden muttered, “Now we’ll have to stay here a day or two until OneHand is well enough to walk.” Temujin smirked and said, “One Hand. Hah. A fitting name for a careless soldier.” Then he bellowed to the rest of his men, “Sumput is no more. From now on, we will know him as ‘OneHand.’ All of you will remember how he let two little village men kill his horse and cut off his hand.”

“This is so, because I say it to be.” With that, he walked off with Harholden to inspect the women and children huddled together by the village shrine.

As Temujin was talking to his men, the eagled had settled on the pile of dead villagers and was gorging itself with the freshly killed meat.

Temujin and Harholden strolled through the terrified captives, poking and pinching, assessing their strength and amusement value.

‘Is there any food in this flea-bitten village?’ Temujin growled at an elderly woman. The terrified woman could only stutter and make pitiful gurgling noises in her throat. Harholden cut her free from the others and kicked her towards the rest of the men. Knowing what was about to happen, they all walked towards the woman, laughing, and joshing each other like little kids about to see a forbidden ritual.

After they formed a circle around the old woman, they started pushing her from one side of the circle to the other. Whenever she fell, they kicked her until she stood up, then resumed their pushing. A warrior grabbed at her tunic, tearing the rotted garment off her body. The men all guffawed at the pathetic sight of the naked old woman standing in the middle of their circle. Her body shook with fear, and urine ran down her legs as she tried to cover herself with her hands. Whitehar, the most sadistic of the men, pulled out his penis and pissed on the woman. This produced a roar of laughter from his peers, and one by one, they all followed suit.

Temujin strutted up to the elderly woman. Drawing his sword, he said, “When I ask a question, it is my wish that you answer me.” Then he killed her with one quick thrust of his sword and dragged her body over to the other women.

“Temujin asked a question. She refused to answer. See what happens when I am disobeyed? Know now that Temujin has spoken and all men tremble at my anger.”

With that declaration, he sheathed his sword, folded his arms, and looked almighty and wonderful in his glory. Harholden pulled another woman from the group and asked her if there was food in the village.

“Yes, Lord, there is a little food.”

“Take two of the peasants and prepare a feast fit for these magnificent men.” demanded Harholden.