Bones of the Hills

by Conn Iggulden

  ‘Why?’ he had said.

  The tears fell freely from her as she crossed to the knife and took it in her hands.

  ‘Xi Xia is my home,’ she had replied, already weeping. He could have killed her then. She did not know why he had not. Instead, he had risen to his feet, still looking at her. He knew he was dying, she was certain. The knowledge had been clear in his yellow eyes and the sudden paleness of his face. She had watched as he fastened the deel around the wound, pulling it tight over a growing spot of blood. He had left her alone with the knife and she lay on the bed and wept for the man she had known.

  Khasar came back to the camp, his horse galloping into the paths through the gers with no care for those who scattered from his way. Those who saw him froze as they understood something was wrong. No more than a few had seen the khan leave the families to ride out, but more saw Khasar return, his face terrible in its fury.

  He reached the khan’s ger. It seemed just moments since he had seen Genghis leave it, but everything had changed. Khasar jumped down before the horse halted, staggering slightly as he bounded up the steps and kicked open the door to the gloom within.

  He breathed hard at what he saw there. Chakahai lay on the low bed, her eyes glassy. Khasar took two steps to stand over her, seeing the cut at her throat and the bloody knife that had fallen from her hands. It was a peaceful scene and it offended him.

  He made an inarticulate bellow, reaching for her flesh so that she was jerked from the bed and fell limply to the floor. Mindless, Khasar plunged his sword into her chest, hacking at her until he was spattered and panting and her head was severed.

  When he appeared at the broken door once again, the khan’s guards had gathered, alerted by his shout. They took one look at the blood on his face and his wild eyes and for an instant Khasar thought they would charge him.

  ‘Where is the khan?’ one of them demanded, raising a bow so that the arrow centred on Khasar’s chest.

  Khasar could not ignore the threat, though he could hardly bring himself to speak. He gestured vaguely to the darkening plain outside the ring of campfires and torches that had sprung up all around.

  ‘He is dead,’ he said. ‘He lies on the grass and the Chin whore who did it lies behind me. Now get out of my way.’

  He strode down through the guards and in confusion and horror they fell back before him. He did not see one of the men race into the ger to check, his shout of anguish following Khasar as he mounted and raced across the camp. His rage had not been sated in cutting at dead flesh. Chakahai’s ger was nearby and he sought her children, determined to take a price for what she had done.

  The ger was empty when he found it, stalking in and out again in just moments. He saw a Chin servant cowering from the blood-spattered general and grabbed her by the throat as she tried to kneel in terror.

  ‘Chakahai’s children,’ he said, squeezing ruthlessly. ‘Where are they?’

  The woman choked, growing red until he released her. She coughed as she lay on the ground and he raised his sword to kill her.

  ‘With Borte, lord. Please, I know nothing.’

  Khasar was already moving. His horse was skittish at the smell of blood on him and had wandered away. He broke into a run, his sword held low as he loped between the gers, looking for the right one. Tears filled his eyes as he thought of his brother cooling on the plain. There would be a price.

  There were many people around Borte’s ger. Word was already spreading through the camp and warriors and families had abandoned their meals and beds to come out. Khasar hardly saw them, his gaze searching and finally alighting on the home he wanted. He could hear the sounds of life within it, voices and laughter. He did not hesitate and threw himself at the door so that it fell flat, the leather hinges tearing free.

  He ducked inside and stood to face the shocked family of his brother. Borte was there, with Ogedai. He was on his feet before Khasar had straightened, his hand on a sword hilt. Khasar barely registered him as his gaze fell on the four young children Chakahai had borne, two girls and two boys. In the lamplight, they stared at the bloody apparition, frozen.

  Khasar lunged for them, his sword rising to kill. Borte screamed and Ogedai threw himself at his uncle, with no time to draw his own sword. The two men went down, but Khasar was too full of rage to be stopped easily. He threw Ogedai off as if he weighed nothing and came lightly to his feet. In his madness, the sound of a drawn blade reached him and his eyes turned slowly to see Ogedai standing ready.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ Khasar snapped.

  Ogedai quivered as his heart raced, but he did not move. It was Borte who broke the tableau between the two men. Death was in the air and, though she was terrified, she made her tone as gentle as she could.

  ‘Are you here to kill me, Khasar?’ she said. ‘In front of the children?’

  Khasar blinked as if returning from far away.

  ‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Genghis is dead. These are the children of his whore.’

  With infinite slowness, Borte too rose to stand before him, moving as she might with a snake about to strike. She spread her arms to shelter those children behind her.

  ‘You will have to kill me, Khasar,’ she said. ‘You will not hurt them.’

  Khasar hesitated. The searing rage that had carried him back to the camp and from ger to ger began to fade and he clutched at it, longing for the simplicity of revenge. His eyes met those of Ogedai and he saw a dawning realisation there amidst the grief. The younger man stood taller in front of his uncle and the quiver in his hands vanished.

  ‘If my father is dead, Khasar,’ Ogedai said, ‘then I am khan of the nation.’

  Khasar grimaced, feeling sick and old as the rage left him.

  ‘Not until you have gathered the tribes and taken their oath, Ogedai. Until then, stand aside.’ He could hardly bear to look into the yellow eyes of Genghis’ heir as he stood before him. There was too much of an echo of the father and Khasar also heard it in Ogedai’s voice as he spoke again.

  ‘You will not kill my brothers and sisters, general,’ he said. ‘Walk away and wash the blood from your face. I will come with you to my father, to see. There is nothing more for you here tonight.’

  Khasar’s head dipped, grief coming at him in a great dark wave. The sword slipped from his hand and Ogedai moved quickly to hold him up before he could fall. Ogedai turned him towards the open doorway and glanced back only once at his mother as she watched, shaking with release.

  EPILOGUE

  All things were new. The brothers and sons of Genghis did not take the khan to the hills of a foreign land to be torn by crows and eagles. They wrapped his body in sheets of bleached linen and sealed it under oil while they reduced the region of Xi Xia to a smoking, desolate ruin. It was his last order and they did not rush the work. A full year passed while every town, every village, every living thing was hunted down and left to rot.

  Only then did the nation move north to the frozen plains, taking the first khan to the Khenti mountains where he had come into the world. The tale of his life was sung and chanted a thousand times, and once read, when Temuge told the full tale from his history. He had trapped the words on calfskin sheets and they were the same no matter how many times he said them.

  Ogedai was khan. He did not gather the tribes and take their oaths while his father lay in oil and cloth. Yet it was his voice that ruled the rest and if his brother Chagatai was sullen at Ogedai’s rise to power, he did not dare let it show. The nation mourned and there was not a living soul who would have challenged Genghis’ right to choose his heir after he had gone from them. With his life complete, they knew again what he had done and meant. His people had risen and his enemies were dust. Nothing else mattered at the last accounting of a life.

  On a bitter dawn, with a chill wind blowing in from the east, the sons and brothers of Genghis rode to the head of his funeral column, leaving the nation behind. Temuge had planned every detail, borrowing from the death rites of more than one p
eople. He rode with Khasar and Kachiun behind a cart drawn by fine horses. A minghaan officer sat high over the animals, urging them on with a long stick. Behind him on the cart lay a simple box of elm and iron, at times seeming too small to contain the man within. In the days before, every man, woman and child of the nation had come to lay a hand on the warm wood.

  The honour guard was just a hundred men, well formed and young. Forty young girls rode with them and they cried out and wailed to the sky father with every pace, marking the passing of a great man and forcing the spirits to attend and listen. The great khan would not go alone into the hills.

  They reached the place Temuge had prepared and the brothers and sons of the khan gathered in grim silence as the box was lifted inside a chamber cut from the rock. They did not speak as the women gashed their throats and lay down, ready to serve the khan in the next world. Only the warriors who oversaw the ritual came out and many of them were red-eyed with grief.

  Temuge nodded to Ogedai and the heir raised his hand gently, standing for a long time as he gazed into the last resting place of his father. He swayed slightly as he stood, his eyes glassy from drink that did nothing to dull his grief. The son of Genghis spoke slurred words in a whisper, but no one heard them as he let his arm fall.

  The warriors heaved on ropes that arced up into the hills. Their muscles grew taut and they strained together until they heard thunder above. Wooden barriers gave way and for a moment, it seemed as if half the mountain fell to block the chamber, raising a cloud of dust so thick that they could not breathe or see.

  When it cleared, Genghis had gone from them and his brothers were satisfied. He had been born in the shadow of the mountain known as Deli’un-Boldakh and they had buried him in that place. His spirit would watch over his people from those green slopes.

  Kachiun nodded to himself, breathing out a great release of tension that he had not realised he felt. He turned his pony with his brothers and looked back only once as they wound their way through the thick trees that covered the slopes. The forest would grow over the scars they had made. In time, Genghis would be part of the hills themselves. Kachiun was grim as he looked over the heads of the young warriors riding with him. The khan would not be disturbed in his rest.

  Just a few miles from the nation’s camp, Khasar rode to the senior officer, telling him to halt his men. All those who had met in the khan’s ger the night before rode forward in a single group: Temuge, Khasar, Tsubodai, Jebe, Kachiun, Jelme, Ogedai, Tolui and Chagatai. They were the seeds of a new nation and they rode well.

  From the camp came Ogedai’s tuman to meet them. The heir reined in as his officers bowed, then sent them past him to kill the honour guard. Genghis would need good men on his path. The generals did not look back as the arrows sang again. The honour guard died in silence.

  On the edge of the encampment, Ogedai turned to those he would lead in the years to come. They had been hardened in war and suffering and they returned his yellow gaze with simple confidence, knowing their worth. He wore the wolf’s-head sword that his father and grandfather had carried. His gaze lingered longest on Tsubodai. He needed the general, but Jochi had died at his hand and Ogedai promised himself there would be a reckoning one day, a price for what he had done. He hid his thoughts, adopting the cold face Genghis had taught him.

  ‘It is done,’ Ogedai said. ‘My father has gone and I will accept the oaths of my people.’

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ‘We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.’

  —George Orwell

  Describing lands as ‘conquered’ by Genghis Khan always requires some qualification of the word. When the Romans conquered Spain and Gaul, they brought roads, trade, cities, bridges, aqueducts — all the trappings of civilisation as they knew it. Genghis was never a builder. To be conquered by the Mongol army meant losing your kings, their armies and most precious cities, but the Mongols never had the numbers to leave a large force behind when they moved on. Mongol warriors would have appeared in markets of Chinese cities, or retired in places as far apart as Korea and Afghanistan, but in general, once the fighting had stopped, there was little active government. In essence, being conquered by the Mongols meant that all local armed forces had to stand down. If word got out that anyone was moving soldiers, they could expect a tuman to turn up on the horizon. The Mongols accepted tribute and controlled the land, but never gave up their nomadic lifestyle while Genghis lived.

  It is a difficult concept to understand eight hundred years later, but the fear induced by Genghis’ mobile forces was perhaps as effective in controlling a beaten province as the stolid presence of Romans. In the seventeenth century, the Muslim chronicler Abu’l Ghazi wrote:

  Under the reign of Genghis Khan, all the country between Iran and the land of the Turks enjoyed such a peace that a man might have journeyed from sunrise to sunset with a golden platter on his head without suffering the least violence from anyone.

  Sheer speed and destruction was crucial to the Mongol success. After all, in the campaign against the Chin emperor, the armies of Genghis Khan attacked more than ninety cities in a single year. Genghis himself was involved in storming twenty-eight, while being repulsed from only four. Historically, he benefited from the fact that China had not yet begun to use gunpowder efficiently in war. Only six years after the fall of Yenking, in 1221, a Chin army used exploding iron pots against the southern Sung city of Qizhou, with a shrapnel effect very like modern grenades. Those who came after him would have to face the weapons of a new era.

  The scene against Russian knights in the first chapter takes place around the same time as the fifth crusade to the Holy Land. To put Russia in historical perspective, the huge cathedral to St Sophia in Novgorod was built as early as 1045 and replaced a wooden church with thirteen domes that was built a century before that. Medieval Russia and indeed Europe was on the brink of the great period of cathedral building and Christian expansion that would clash with Islam for the next four centuries. I have described the period armour and weapons of the knights as accurately as possible.

  The Mongols did reach Korea - though I used an older pronunciation of ‘Koryo’ throughout. The name means the ‘high and beautiful land’. Mongol forces destroyed the Khara-Khitai, a branch of the Chin who had left their homeland and dug themselves into the mountains of Korea, where it was beyond the ability of that dynasty to root them out.

  In men like his brother Khasar, Jebe and Tsubodai, the khan had found a band of generals who justified the name of ‘the hunting dogs of Genghis’. They were practically unstoppable - and yet Genghis turned towards Islamic central Asia before the conquest of China, even northern China, was complete. In the history, Jebe, the arrow, was established in his role earlier than I have it, but the pressures of plotting makes changes sometimes inevitable. He and Tsubodai became the two most famous generals of their day - twins in ability, ruthlessness and absolute loyalty to the khan.

  Genghis did not fight to rule cities, for which he had no use whatsoever. His purpose was almost always personal, to break or kill individual enemies, no matter how many armies and cities stood in the way. He was prepared to treat once with the Chin Emperor over Yenking, but when the Emperor ran for Kai-Feng-fu, Genghis burned the city and sent an army after him. As wide-ranging as the destruction was, it was still a battle between Genghis and one family.

  Other events made Genghis look away from his single-minded and personal approach to warfare. It is true that one of the Mongol diplomatic - read spy - caravans was slaughtered by the Shah of Khwarezm. Genghis sent between 100 and 450 men (depending on the source), only to see them held by the governor of Otrar, a relative of the shah. Even then, Genghis assumed the man was a rogue and sent three more men to accept the governor as prisoner and negotiate for the release of the first group. They too were killed and it was that act that brought Genghis into the Islamic nations. At that point in time, he almost certainly in
tended to complete the conquest of China. He had no desire to open up an entire new front against a teeming enemy. Yet he was not a man to ignore a naked challenge to his authority. The Mongol army moved and millions would die. Genghis went alone to the top of a mountain and prayed to the sky father, saying: ‘I am not the author of this trouble, but grant me the strength to exact vengeance.’

  In infuriating Genghis, the governor of Otrar made what is perhaps one of the worst military decisions in history. Perhaps he thought he could scorn the khan of the Mongols with impunity. As a cousin to the shah and with vast armies available, he may have thought little of the Mongol threat.

  The original city of Otrar remains rubble today and has never been rebuilt. Inalchuk was executed by having molten silver poured into his eyes and ears. Though I have altered the order of falling cities, the shah was routed and sent running with Tsubodai and Jebe on his trail, as I have described it. He stayed ahead of them for a thousand miles, crossing modern-day Uzbekistan and Iran to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where he took a boat with his sons to a small island. Exhausted, he died of pneumonia there and his son Jelaudin (or Jalal Ud Din) was left to take his father’s place at the head of the Arab armies. He faced Genghis at last against the Indus river and escaped almost alone, while his army was crushed. The boy who would become Kublai Khan was indeed there and Genghis is said to have made a point of noting Jelaudin’s bravery to him, as an example of how a man should live and die.

  The Arab Assassins are perhaps most famous for giving us the word in English, from Hashishin, by way of Marco Polo’s ‘Ashishin’, following their practice of creating a mad frenzy with the drug. However, it may have the simpler route of coming from ‘assasseen’, Arabic for ‘guardian’. As Shia Muslims, they differed from the main Sunni branch of Islam. The practice of showing drug-dazed recruits a version of heaven and hell is true. One can only imagine the result of such experiences on impressionable young minds. Certainly their reputation was for ferocious loyalty to the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. At their height, their influence was vast and the story is true about leaving a poisoned cake on Saladin’s chest as he slept, a clear message to leave them alone in his conquests. Though their strongholds were destroyed by Genghis and the khans after him, the sect remained active for many years.