Kokchu raised his eyes piously and solemnly to the rounded roof of the yurt. “I can assure thee of that,” he said with fervor.
Kurelen winced. “How thou must have enjoyed thyself,” and bit his tongue for the childishness of his words.
But Kokchu merely inclined his head seriously. He hesitated. Kurelen could detect no particular hostility in this man. But all at once he did detect loneliness. Kokchu’s loneliness was suddenly as poignant and as imminent as his own; it had the same smell, the same presence. For a moment he felt compassion, followed by a curious and cunning hatred, as though he were hating himself. He knew he had been correct in his surmise, for Kokchu’s next words were revealing.
“Thou and I, Kurelen: we are men of understanding. We are men among animals. We could laugh together.”
Kurelen smiled. “But thou wouldst deny me the pleasure of laughing at thee, also.”
Kokchu pursed his lips in amusement. “Nay, thou mayest laugh, for all of me. I ask only that thou dost laugh in secret.”
“And not at thy dupes?”
Kokchu’s lip curled; he seemed to gaze at Kurelen as though both surprised and dissillusioned. He leaned over him, plucked at the cloth on his breast.
“Look thee, Kurelen: thou hast lived in Cathay, where there are men. But these are only beasts. Why dost thou not seek worthier objects for thy laughter?” His voice was scornful, his eyes full of contempt.
Kurelen stared, and then his sallow and shrunken features were suffused with mortification. He was speechless. The Shaman stood up, shook out his furs and his felt garments, fastidiously. He glanced at Chassa, who still crouched by the fire. The girl turned her head over her shoulder, and gazed back at the priest with the eyes, humility and fear of a dog. Kokchu picked up a strand of her long hair, and curled it about his fingers as one curls the hair of a child. “Thou hast done well by thy master, Chassa,” he said, in his rich voice.
Without another word to Kurelen, he left the yurt. He left behind him a peculiar blankness, as though some essence, some power, had been withdrawn from the air. Kurelen closed his eyes; he was burning with rage and humiliation. When Chassa approached him, timidly proffering him a bowl of hot mare’s milk, he thrust aside her hand and shook his head.
He must have slept, for when he opened his eyes again he discovered that Chassa was gone, and that it was Houlun who sat beside him, motionless and watchful. Her hood lay on her shoulders; her glittering hair hung like black spun glass about her beautiful face. Her gray eyes were soft and smiling. She had been bathing his face, and he could smell the fragrance of the scent with which the warm water had been perfumed. When she saw he was conscious, she leaned over him and laid her warm full cheek against his for a moment. His heart seemed to rush to the spot which she had touched, and beat there, madly and painfully.
“Ah, Houlun,” he murmured faintly. He took her hand; he held it against his breast with both of his. She could feel the pounding of his heart, which raced under her palms. She laughed softly, and shook her head at him.
“It is well for thee that I had just given my husband a son, and so could prevail upon him with my pleadings,” she said. Kurelen saw that the fur-wrapped bundle near by, much agitated, was his sister’s child.
Houlun continued: “But he was certain thou would have had his life, and it took many days to persuade him to the contrary. Ah, Kurelen, thou must have a care!”
“What didst thou tell him, Houlun?”
She began to laugh lightly. Her face shone like a pearl in the uncertain firelight.
“I told him it was impossible! I told him thou didst not have the courage to kill a mouse.”
They laughed together, then. All at once the interior of the yurt seemed warm and full, as though joy and contentment pervaded it.
“But thou must have a care, my brother,” repeated Houlun, ceasing her laughter. “The next time I might fail. But thou wilt never learn to hold thy tongue, I fear.”
She picked up the squirming bundle, which had begun to emit protesting roars. When Kurelen looked at the child, after Houlun had carefully unwrapped several layers of wool, he realized how long he had been ill. The boy was vigorous, and had an angry light in his great gray eyes. Though less than three moons old, he struggled to raise himself in his mother’s arms. His red hair was a tangle of raw gold over his large round head, and his lips were the color of pomegranates. Houlun laid him beside Kurelen, and the baby and the man regarded each other with passionate solemnity. Kurelen’s expression reluctantly changed. He appeared to be embarrassed, after a few moments. He shut his eyes.
“Take him away,” he said with a half laugh. “The eyes of children see too much.”
Houlun lifted the child. She exposed the full moon of her breast, and the infant began to suck with loud noises. Houlun’s head drooped over him; the firelight outlined the immobile figures, and Houlun’s face was hidden by her falling hair. Kurelen felt that he was being drawn into the profound circle of mysterious life and strength which appears to surround a mother and her suckling child. Contentment and peace flowed over him like cool water over burned flesh.
Houlun informed him, after she had tended to the needs of the child, that she lived in comparative quiet. Yesukai rarely plagued her with his demands, for he was engrossed with his second wife, the Karait girl. She was already with child, and the Shaman had promised another son. But Houlun had refused to have her in her own yurt, as was the custom with wives. Yesukai, remembered Kurelen, stood in some awe of Houlun; this was usually the way of things between the simple and the imperious.
Again, the child was laid beside Kurelen, and again the two looked at each other with passionate intensity, and in deep silence. Then suddenly dogs began to bark savagely outside; the clamor rose to a deafening crescendo. Kurelen felt the child wince at the noise; the little lips parted, and he whimpered. Fear, stark and adult, made the child’s gray eyes wide and intent in the dusky light.
“He is afraid of dogs,” said Houlun, smiling. “Young as he is, he crouches in mine arms, at the sound of their barking.”
But Kurelen did not hear her. He was absorbed in something terrible and unhuman which he was glimpsing behind the gray curtain of the infant’s eyes, and which was not concerned with the clamor of the dogs.
Chapter 8
Many times, as the seasons revolved, had Kurelen made this prodigious journey across mountain and desert, steppe and plateau, river and plain, fleeing the winter, seeking warmer winds and green pastures. But each time it were as though he had never experienced this before. The frightful vastness, the immense loneliness, the sensation that only this small band of wanderers were alive in the universal chaos of gale and snow and ridge and wilderness, had a breathless fascination for him. Some of the chronic and distant pain within him was lifted and dissipated, as though the mighty struggle and passion of the elements outside had drawn out his own torment, as a great sea sucks into its anonymity the little trickles of tiny streams. He lost the misery of individual consciousness for an hour; his consciousness was part of the dim consciousness beyond him, and so lost the sharp edges of awareness.
Moreover, no scene was so savage, So awful, so crushing, that it frightened him. At times he was seized with a desire to howl with unseen wolves, to scream with the hurricanes, to roar with the roaring of the dead forests of poplars, tamarisks, firs and reeds. When a disordered string of wild shaggy camels raced grotesquely against the gray and swirling sky-line, he shouted with glee, feeling himself one with them, feeling the bitter cut of sleet and wind through matted hair, feeling long stringy muscles pulling against suffocating air, experiencing the endless struggle between the animate and inanimate.
As his strength increased, he would weakly wrap himself in layers of felt and fur, pull his hood over his head, and limp out upon the platform of the yurt. He would sit there, while Chassa, standing before the closed flap, would guide the oxen. The girl, choking in the tearing wind, which was full of sand and ice and snow, would
bend her head so that her face was partially protected by hair and hood. The yurts were all linked together, moving as a fluid unit, one shaft fastened to the axle of another vehicle. There, in the shadowy dusk of the enveloping and pursuing winter, would sit Kurelen for hours, not talking, not moving, hardly breathing, all his consciousness in his eyes and the scenes upon which they untiringly gazed.
Sometimes he would think: It is good to be a townsman before one’s secure fire and amid secure walls. It is good to have all one’s effort and soul concentrated on the smallness of perfection, to feel that nothing matters but that a leaf be delicately painted on a square of yellow silk. It is good to believe that exquisiteness is more valuable than life, and that the sole purpose for which man is created is to perfect his manners, or to admire the tracery on a silver bowl, or to listen to pretty verses and to converse with friends who are interested in the dead manuscripts of philosophy. Perhaps it is delightful to feel rapture over a phrase which cannot be surpassed, or a strain of music which has reached pure excellence and beauty. But now I verily believe that the pursuit of perfection leads only to death. The arts are only pallid excrescences of the soul. The phrasemaker and the philosopher are the priests of dissolution. Man the Spectator is Man the Corpse. Man the Individual is Man the Lost. Only by surrender to the universal Soul doth man gain true life, and in understanding the universe about him, and in partaking of it, doth he acquire the fullness of joy.
He would think: here is the substance of living, the raw spring of being. Danger and strife are the natural states of man. He who deprives his fellow of them, and shuts him safely within walls, hath made of his brother a chattering ape clad in silk, a eunuch both impotent and sterile, a blind fashioner of gold bracelets, an unbreathing polisher of stone.
The moving ordu, beehives of rounded black felt on wooden platforms and drawn by gasping oxen, rumbled and heaved and shuddered its way southward. Slowly, awful panoramas formed and sank and dissolved and shifted before Kurelen’s eyes. Ranges of black and broken mountains rose upon the horizons of the snow-filled steppes, marbled with livid ice and cracked asunder with falling chasms. The ranges would curve like a scimitar in their path, then move aside, to ring them in immense rams’ horns. They would rise upon an endless plateau, upon which not a tree or a stone was visible, and upon which tall gray grasses, dry and withered, moved with a deathly sound in the dropping snow. They would pass gray and moaning forests, whose naked trees and dried river-beds showed mutely where fertile civilizations had lived and had died, and been abandoned to the marten and the desert lizard. Aisles of black firs moved upon them menacingly, the floor about them white as bone, their hairy limbs laden with tufts of snow. They entered, lumberingly, labyrinths of desolate hills, as bare as the palms of one’s hands. They passed black skeletal walls of stone, sculptured by the unceasing wind, descended into broad latitudinal valleys cracked with frozen watercourses, strewn with gray-green tamarisks, made chaotic with boulders and jagged pillars and volcanic rocks. Here and there, like shattered mirrors, were strewn frozen sheets of water the color of polished lead, and reflecting in them the dull cloud-shapes or the image of a twisted column of stone. At long intervals a lonely hawk or other bird of prey would cut the gaseous sky with a curving wing, and then sink out of sight. But it moved without sound. Even the wind, resistless and omnipresent, seemed less a sound than a terrific presence. It rolled and swept over the deathly immobility of rock and hill and valley like a tremendous shadow of doom, increasing and enhancing the transfixed silence.
The ordu was the only moving thing in this colossal wilderness, and it became a sluggish trickle of ants creeping through mountain passes and struggling over the enormous plateaus. Lost and tiny, it disappeared between scarified ramparts, emerged upon plains of utter desolation, crept towards a horiozon vanishing into vaporous sky. There was something awesome in its courage, its grim determination. One by one the yurts would tilt into vast shallow caldrons, lurch over rocks hidden by the snow, painfully climb the opposite side. And then onward moved the ordu, defiant of the wilderness, its tiny collection of hearts beating warmly and strongly in the universal tomb, undaunted by crystalline schists, by gigantic layers of rock sliding with snow, tilted up like great platters, and showing, in the livid light of full day, scars of crystal and scarlet and vivid blue; not to be turned back by empty steppes and gorges and ravines and torrents fanged with glittering ice. In the soul of the nomads was an irresistible urge, the urge found in migratory birds who fly by instinct rather than by reason.
At intervals ice-storms raged, coating shaft and yurt and wheel with faint thick crystal, fringing the eyes of the oxen and breaking under the wheels with the echoing sound of shattering glass. The storms would flay the faces of the Mongols, for often they would be laden with sand. Sometimes the awful silence would be convulsed with detonations of thunder, and the nomads, superstitiously terrified, would halt in their tracks and cover their deafened ears, muttering prayers.
But as they crept southward, they left the tides of winter increasingly behind. Now they would come out upon bleached terraces, huge and shallow and tilted, going up into the sky or downwards to the valleys, like the vast ruined stairways of giants. Here there was little snow, and the gales screamed as though released. The skies were less vaporous. Sometimes, in a heaven the pale delicate hue of turquoises, the clouds would pile up lightly, ballooning immensely, layer upon layer, their upper reaches burnished with silver. The deformed and stunted vegetation would thaw at noon, and could be eaten by the cattle and horses and camels. The moving ranges of mountains, sinking and rising and curving, were sometimes flooded with purple and yellow, and at sunset, with bright pink. Gullies, wind-eroded and ribbed and winding, had snow only at the bottoms. Boundless areas of earth, dry and crumbling, were mixed with gravel and covered with desert scrub. Oases, weedy and forlorn, were increasingly encountered. Foot by foot, the Mongols moved onward, quickening their pace, now, laughing occasionally. Networks of greenish-gray and yellow lakes and rivers, frozen except at noon, were encountered and could be crossed on ice-bridges.
Nothing missed Kurelen’s hypnotized eye in all this enormity of sky and wilderness and silence. Long after others were asleep, he would sit on the yurt platform, his lashes bristling with ice, and watch the measureless streaming of the Northern Lights, and listen to their crackling. Ribbon by ribbon, leagues in length, they would explode and uncurl against the black sky, hurting the eye with their blazes of scarlet and blue and dazzling white. False rainbows, vivid and incredible, would arch against the lightless darkness, pulsing and flaming. Crowns, hundreds of miles in diameter, would glitter and burn, their ragged points gemmed with stars. Sometimes, at vast distances, Kurelen would hear the melancholy howling of wolves, the voices of the wilderness.
And now he knew that soon they would encounter other ordus moving southward. The grasslands to which all were headed were just north of the Gobi sands, and as yet there had been no real contest for them. There was room to spare, many thought, tolerantly. So other ordus, regarded as enemies during the journey, could be greeted with polite reserve. The boys of other tribes would fish with those of Yesukai’s, breaking the morning and evening ice on the rivers to catch the fat fish. Sometimes one ordu would help another with diminishing supplies. The young warriors would engage in wrestling, and often, if intermarriage was permitted, there would be wedding feasts and much revelry. There was a feeling of escape from imminent danger, which added luster to gaiety.
In these fertile valleys between the rivers Onon and Kerulon the winters were fairly endurable, and there was often nearly adequate sustenance for the herds. The grazing lands of Yesukai’s people extended vaguely from Lake Baikul eastward, and here the wild antelope and the hare and the fox and lizard and marten, and sometimes the bear, could be hunted. It was a life of harshness, and sometimes when the herds had been consumed to the danger point, the people were compelled to live on kumiss and millet. Hunters desperately went far afield, sleepin
g in the snow without a fire, searching for elusive game. Towards the spring, the earlier intercourse between tribes became infrequent, and there was sullenness and fighting, often breaking out into bloody violence. Then raids were organized, and the boys spent sleepless nights, watching for robbers, or hunting for stray cattle. A fast of three days was not rare. Sometimes, during a severe period of bad weather, many froze to death. But in the spring the mares and the cows, feasting on freshened and more abundant pasture, gave large quantities of milk, and young foals and calves and lambs were born, and the tribesmen stuffed to capacity, and gorged. Then came the long journey back to the summer pastures, gayer this time, and less arduous.
The chieftains sternly shared the miseries and hungers with their people. The warriors, it is true, fared better than the others, for upon their strength and fortitude depended the very existence of the tribe. Women with child had a larger share of supplies than usual, but otherwise they and their children had only the leavings of the pots. It was a happy time for all when the spring journey began; amity was restored between passing tribes. Hunger, the great destroyer of love and friendship and tolerance, had been drowned in the flood of new milk and trampled in the cavorting of new life. It is true that the warriors, feeling strong again, and exceedingly lustful, would raid other tribes for women, and gallop into their ordus with them weeping behind them on the saddles. But not too much ill temper was aroused by this. Women were born for the beds of strong men, and the victor was more or less condoned. The women expected this, and felt badly used if they were not eventually carried off, or at least vigorously fought for.
The winter of violent red sunsets gleaming over frozen lakes and white barrens was over. The stars were softer at night, now, and the moon gentler. On their way to the summer pastures, they saw that the scarlet walls and ramparts and cliffs glowed against deep blue skies, and that the rivers were sometimes the color of blood from the silt of the red soil. Grass and scrub and tamarisk were the hue of brilliant green jade, and the desert blossomed with leagues of flowers. Sometimes miles of white flowers bent before the fresh strong wind, and blue and golden and rosy petals flowed over plateau and ridge and gulley like an enormous Turkish carpet. Birds cut hot white skies with vivid wings, and their voices, exultant, filled the desert with exciting song. The journey back was slow, for the herds must fill out their ribs, and the people must feast. Often at nights the heavens would be ripped with the flame of lightning, and the earth would roar and tremble with thunder. Vegetation, from the stunted and deformed trees of the Gobi, to the thick grass and the flowers, burst overnight into an orgy of life, and all the air was full of the sound of feverish growing. Almost within a few hours, it seemed, the lush grass was knee-high, and the yurts tossed and heaved and lumbered over horizonless steppes which resembled blowing green seas. The winds were laden with fecund smells. When the torrential rains fell, gray as spears and gleaming like impassable glassy walls, the odors were sometimes suffocating. It was as if the endless land and desert were exhaling clouds of steam, overpoweringly filled with the hot emanations of thousands of miles of orgiastic fruitfulness. Shining dark-green lakes and streams and rivers and pools were streaked with white threads, like liquid marble. Now the campfires at night were centers of revelry and song and laughter, and incredible stories and boastings.
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