Eye of Flame (24 page)

Koko Mongke Tengri, the Eternal Blue Sky that covered all of Earth, had granted them a warm and windless day, although the late summer weather could change suddenly. The stream that had watered the sheep was a slender blue ribbon that wound in sharp loops over the endless grassland. Hoelun Ujin, Khokakhchin’s young mistress, nudged a straying lamb back toward the flock with her juniper stick. With her golden-brown eyes and smooth light brown skin, Hoelun was still a beautiful woman; it was easy to see why her husband Yesugei prized her.

Khasar, Hoelun’s two-year-old son, rode toward Khokakhchin on a ewe, clinging to the short shorn wool with both hands. The ewe bleated; Khasar fell from her back. His older brother Temujin quickly pushed his way through the sheep milling around the ewe, grabbed one sleeve of Khasar’s short brown tunic, and dragged him to safety. The four-year-old Temujin had his father’s odd pale eyes of green and gold mixed with brown, and his straight dark hair had a coppery sheen. He could sit a horse by himself and already showed skill in handling his small bow. Khokakhchin felt a pang of sorrow, remembering the son she had lost when he was no older than Temujin.

Temujin helped Khasar climb back onto the ewe, then led him toward their mother. Hoelun Ujin rested her hands on her swollen belly and smiled at her sons. The Ujin’s third child would come soon. Khokakhchin would be with Hoelun during her labor, as she had been when Temujin and Khasar were born.

Knowing how to aid in bringing new life into the world had helped Khokakhchin save her own life. She thought of the first time she had seen Yesugei Bahadur, sitting on his horse with his sword in hand, yurts burning behind him as he shouted orders to his men; he had terrified her. Later, as she huddled with the other prisoners, waiting to learn if they would be put to the sword or taken away as slaves, she had heard the Bahadur speak to one of his comrades of the child his first wife would soon give him.

Khokakhchin had seen her chance and seized it. “I have some of an idughan’s lore,” she had called out to the man whose Mongol warriors had brought such ruin to the Tatar camp. “I know of birthing.” Yesugei Bahadur had ridden toward her; she had forced herself to meet his pale greenish eyes, so unlike any eyes she had ever seen. “These Tatars attacked my people years ago,” she continued, “and killed those I loved, and my life among them has been a hard one. I would more willingly serve you.”

The Mongol studied her for a while without speaking. “My first wife may need your skill,” Yesugei said at last. “You’ll be taken to my camp. If all goes well, you’ll be her servant, but if any harm comes to her or to my child, you will die, and painfully—I promise you that.” He had then sent her on a hard ride back to his camp with his brother Nekun-taisi and another man.

The spirits had favored Khokakhchin. Hoelun had suffered in labor, but her son was born whole and healthy and clutching a clot of blood in his fist, a sign that he would be a great leader. Yesugei had named the boy Temujin, after the Tatar chief he had just defeated and killed.

Ahead of the women herding the sheep lay the wagons and black felt yurts of Yesugei’s camping circle. Yesugei and his brothers were milking the mares tethered with their foals outside the Bahadur’s tent. Khokakhchin caught up with two of the younger women, found that they were still talking about Jali-gulug, and fell behind them once more. She did not want to hear talk of Jali-gulug and spirits and magic. She had dealt in magic once, long ago, and had sworn never to do so again.

“Dobon’s son has the makings of a shaman,” Hoelun said to Sochigil, Yesugei’s second wife. Khokakhchin fed more fuel to the fire burning in the metal hearth. She had come to respect Hoelun’s wisdom during her years as the young woman’s servant, and was pleased the Ujin finally understood what Jali-gulug was.

“Do you think so?” Sochigil set a platter of dried curds and strips of cooked lamb on the low table in the back of the tent. “I saw Bughu riding to Dobon’s yurt from the tent of Orbey Khatun. I thought she might have sent him there to drive the evil spirits from Jali-gulug.”

“Bughu ought to be teaching the boy some of the shaman’s arts,” Hoelun said as she took her place next to her husband.

“Perhaps he will,” Yesugei Bahadur muttered. “Let us hope Jali-gulug has the shaman’s calling. He’s not good for much else.”

Yesugei was sitting on a felt cushion at the north of the tent, with his four sons on his right and his two wives at his left. He was a handsome, broad-shouldered man with sharp cheekbones, long mustaches, and black braids coiled behind the ears of his shaven head. Belgutei, Sochigil’s three-year-old son, jostled against Khasar at the low table. Khokakhchin settled on her cushion and shot a warning glance at Bekter, Sochigil’s older son, who got into fights with his half-brother Temujin far too often. Hoelun handed her husband a cup of kumiss. Yesugei dipped his fingers into the mare’s milk and scattered the drops while whispering a blessing.

The Bahadur seemed contented tonight. The herds of sheep, cattle, and horses had found good grazing this summer. There had been no raids on his camp during this season, and none of the sudden fierce and deadly storms that even summer could bring, while his scouts had reported that Yesugei’s Tatar enemies were now camped farther to the east and south, away from these lands. This autumn, Yesugei and his men would make a foray against the Merkits, who camped in the northern lands. They would be richly rewarded for that effort by Toghril, the wealthy Khan of the Kereits, who hated the Merkit tribes as much as Yesugei did. Even Jali-gulug’s afflictions and wanderings could be seen as a good omen; Yesugei might eventually have a powerful shaman in his service.

Such contentment, Khokakhchin knew, might endure for an evening, a moon, a season, but rarely for longer than that. Yesugei needed accord among his people if they were to stand against their enemies, but the unity he had brought about could easily fracture, as it had before among the Mongol clans. Sooner or later, the Bahadur would again be arguing with his younger brother Daritai over such matters as when and where to move camp and which men were to herd the horses to their new grazing lands. Orbey Khatun still believed that her grandson Targhutai should be chief in this camp instead of Yesugei, even if she no longer said so openly. Orbey, the widow of Ambaghai Khan, was consumed by two ambitions: wreaking vengeance on the Tatars who had sent her husband to his death, and having a leader in this camp whom she could control.

Khokakhchin listened to Yesugei and his wives as they talked of Orbey and Bughu and Jali-gulug, but said nothing. She was used to keeping her thoughts to herself, knowing that the safest course for a servant or slave was to be useful, trusted, and silent. She would follow the ways of the marmot, burrowing into her hole, keeping her ear to the ground, surviving.

The dream came to her again. The spirits always sent the same dream to her after she had come to believe herself free of it forever.

She was running for the horses, hearing her husband’s voice calling to her above the curses and screams of the others. The steppe was a plain of fire, the flames a wall moving closer to the camp. People were fleeing the flames on horseback, in wagons, on foot. She cried her husband’s name and saw him in the doorway of a burning yurt, the tent collapsing around him. In the distance, she heard the war drums and the shouts of the enemies who had sent the flames against them.

Khokakhchin woke with a start. The dream did not tell all of the truth, only a part of it. A fire had consumed her camp long ago, when she was still a young woman. Her husband Bujur had died in the flames. Tatar warriors riding against her people had used the fire as their shield in attacking the camp; Khokakhchin and others who had survived the attack had been taken into captivity. But the Tatars had not sent the flames against them.

The only sound inside the yurt was the deep, steady breathing of sleepers. Temujin and Khasar lay on beds of felt cushions on the western side of the tent; Hoelun was asleep in the bed in the back. Yesugei had gone to Sochigil’s tent for the night. It was good for him to divide his attentions as equally as possible between his wives, and Hoelun was too heavy with child now to take much pleasure from her husband, but Khokakhchin knew that the Bahadur preferred Hoelun’s bed to Sochigil’s.

Khokakhchin lay under her hide, wondering why her old dream had come to her that night, then got up, covered her head with a scarf, and crept from her bed toward the hearth. The argal burning in the six-legged metal hearth under the cauldron glowed dimly. Fire was sacred; without it, people could not have cooked their food, could not have been purified by passing between two fires before entering a camp, could not have found warmth when the winter winds swept across the steppe, could not have lighted their way through moonless and cloudy nights. She could not imagine the world without fire. But fire was also something to be feared.

Khokakhchin knelt by the fire and stretched her gnarled hands toward the heat. Her thoughts often wandered to the past, especially at night. Sometimes what she recalled was so clear that she almost felt that her spirit had been carried back to her old life, to live through it again. Now she thought of the man who had shown her the eye of fire so long ago.

He had come to her camp with a caravan not long after her marriage to Bujur. The traders in the caravan had gone to the northern forests to trade with the Uriangkhai, the Reindeer People, for sable pelts. Most of the caravan’s goods had been traded, but there were still a few bolts of silk, some sharp knives, carved goblets, and polished mirrors to trade for sheep, wool, and hides before the strangers returned to their own Ongghut lands in the south.

One man, who had small brown eyes, a round cheerful face, and a wisp of beard on his chin, had shown Khokakhchin a mirror. She had never seen her face clearly before, having caught only an occasional glimpse of herself in a still pool of water or a polished piece of metal. She stared at her image, making faces at herself, until the women around her were laughing and demanding time to look at themselves. Bujur called her his beauty, but the mirror had shown Khokakhchin a broad face with reddish-brown cheeks and eyes that were a bit too long and narrow.

Another woman was making faces at the mirror as those near her giggled. The men, after riding out to greet the traders, rummaging through their packs of goods, leading the visitors between the fires outside the camping circles, and getting five horses in exchange for two camels the traders needed for their journey south across the desert, had left it to the women to trade for other goods. The women passed the mirror around, then got down to the serious business of trading wool for silk.

The traders laid out their goods on the ground in the center of the chief’s circle of wagons and tents. Khokakhchin’s yurt was in the chief’s camping circle, since Bujur was his younger brother, so she had brought out her soft beaten wool and secured a trade for a bolt of blue silk by the time others were returning with their hides, rolls of wool, and pieces of felt.

“And what for the mirror?” the trader asked her.

She was tempted by the mirror, but could see well enough in a small piece of metal to braid her hair and secure the braids under her bocca, the square headdress of birch bark that sat on her head. “I need no mirror,” she replied, unwilling to trade good wool for something that would only make her more vain.

The man shrugged and was about to put the mirror back into his pack when his coat fell open. Around his neck, on a thin gold chain, hung a clear disk that looked like a piece of ice encased in a round golden band.

“What is that ornament?” Khokakhchin had asked, gesturing at the disk.

“It is what the people of Khitai call a lens.” The trader slipped it from his neck and held it out to her. “But the old sage who traded it to me called it a firemaker. He claimed that he could do magic with it, that by holding it in a certain way when the sun was shining, he could bring fire.”

Khokakhchin shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

“I saw him do it. He had other such pieces, and gave me this one for much silver. I was happy to have it at that price.”

“Too much to give for such a bauble,” Khokakhchin said.

More women had collected near them. The man glanced up at the cloudless blue summer sky, then said, “This is no bauble, Lady.”

He asked for something that would burn easily. Two of the women sent their children for some bits of wood and dry grass. The trader directed them to stand back, then held the disk over the tinder; a point of sunlight appeared on the fuel.

The women watched for a long time in silence. Just as Khokakhchin was about to ask when magic would be made, the tinder flared up and she saw a tiny flame.

The women gasped, threw their hands over their eyes, and made signs against evil. The tiny fire quickly burned out. Khokakhchin gazed at the blackened tinder, thinking of what could happen if such a disk were left lying in a patch of dry grass away from the camp. The steppe might go up in flame. She had heard about such fires, of animals and people fleeing from them, of people moving to new grazing grounds only to find them burned away.

Lightning could bring such fires, and everyone knew that only evil deeds and grave violations of custom brought lightning to strike at the Earth. When lightning flashed across Heaven, people threw themselves to the ground in terror; to be caught out on the steppe away from camp and hear thunder was especially frightening. Lightning could strike anywhere. It came to Khokakhchin that the trader’s disk had summoned a kind of lightning; she thought that she had seen a tiny bolt as thin as a thread under the disk before the tinder burned.