The Tiger Queens (14 page)

I wondered if perhaps that was his intent.

*   *   *

I was brought to the birthing tent past my time and labored while the sun twice rose and set, alternating between fighting for life and wishing for death to claim me. Finally, my daughter fell into this world, howling like a wild dog gnawing its own afterbirth, dark eyes glaring and fists clenched. She almost killed me in the process, ripping me so Hoelun was scarcely able to sew together my ravaged skin. “This girl tried to send you to the sacred mountains,” she muttered, a sinew string between her lips as she threaded a bone needle. It was difficult to hear her over the squalling child. “This should be the last foal you give my son.”

To move required more effort than I could manage as she began stitching so I stared at the soot-stained ceiling, gripping handfuls of damp bedcovers. “I’m Genghis’ wife,” I murmured weakly, between clenched teeth. “It’s my duty to fill our
ger
with children.”

Yet all I wanted to do now was sleep, despite the shadow of death that still lurked at the entrance of the tent.

“You are also khatun,” Hoelun said from between my legs. “Which you can’t very well be from the sacred mountains.”

Mother Khogaghchin, now beyond ancient, crooned and washed my crying daughter’s naked pink body with a damp rag. Her gnarled hand smoothed the baby’s shock of black hair into lying smooth against her forehead, but it sprang back up. My child’s hair looked like a porcupine had made its den atop her head.

Quiet finally fell as Mother Khogaghchin laid her on my chest and the
babe found my nipple. Already I had the breasts and stomach of an old woman, but the Earth Mother and Eternal Blue Sky had blessed me with four strong children. For that I was grateful.

I drifted toward sleep as my daughter nursed, scarcely noticing as Hoelun left to summon Genghis while Khogaghchin finished wiping my daughter with a rag. The old woman’s shocked exclamation startled me, pulling my nipple from the baby’s mouth so the tent erupted in so savage a howl that my ears rang.

“What is it?” I rearranged myself so my daughter could continue nursing, her glare fiercer than ever as she sucked greedily.

“Her hand.” Mother Khogaghchin stared as if the child might be missing a thumb, but all ten of her fingers curved like talons. Khogaghchin pried open a little fist—earning a sharper glare—to reveal a shiny blood clot like a black pearl. “Just like her father,” she whispered, removing the clot gently, reverently, as if it were a precious gem. I took it, watching it stain the creases of my palm as Genghis pushed into the tent, looking as haggard as I felt. It was only as he entered that the shadow of death was finally banished from the birthing tent, as if the familiar foes had greeted each other too often on the battlefield.

Genghis crouched at my bedside, shadows under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in days. “My mother claims it was a difficult birth.” He took my hand in his, mingling the blood of my womb with that of the birth sacrifice. “She says I might lose you if you go again to the birthing tent.”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes.” I tried to pull my daughter off the nipple, but she gave me a scowl that so reminded me of her father that I chuckled, although the movement cost me dear. “Right now you should meet your very greedy little girl.”

Genghis touched one of her tiny fists. After a moment’s hesitation, the child’s fingers opened like the petals of a mountain daisy, still streaked with blood and tipped with ragged nails. My husband filled his lungs with her soul and exhaled.

Only then did I see the tears in his eyes.

“I’d call her Alaqai,” I said, smoothing her furrowed brow. Genghis might name our sons, but I would name our daughters. The child stared at
her father, as if memorizing his every feature. Her lashless eyes blinked, then finally fluttered closed. “This was in her hand,” I said, revealing the black clot of blood. Genghis drew a sharp breath and looked at the child with new eyes.

Alaqai.
Palm of the Hand
.

I protected Jochi like a mother wolf, but my sons needed little of me after they tired of my milk. This girl would be my own, the daughter I would teach to pound felt and carry the stories of our clan. For the first time in so many years, I felt the urge to scry again, my fingertips itching to hold the bones, to teach her how to read the cracks and shadows in the marrow.

“Alaqai,” Genghis said, letting the name linger on his tongue. “A fitting name for a warrior born with a clot of blood in her fist.”

“A warrior?”

“Of course.” Genghis pressed his lips to my forehead so I felt his smile. “She’ll be the fiercest marmot on the steppes.”

“Marmot?” I arched an eyebrow and sniffed the air. “Have you been too deep into the
airag
already?”

“Not yet, although there’s a jug or two waiting for me outside.” He chuckled and ruffled our daughter’s damp hair, earning a gentle slap from me lest he wake her. “Alaqai has another meaning outside Palm of the Hand, at least among the clan of my birth.”

“And what is that?”

He laughed, a low rumble that started deep in his chest. “Siberian marmot.”

I laughed then, and Alaqai’s eyes fluttered open. This time it was Genghis who shushed me with a mock frown.

“I’ll teach this little scrap of fur how to ride,” he said when she’d settled back to sleep. “To throw a spear and launch an arrow.”

I knew he worried for my safety while war raged around us, and now we had a daughter to protect. I patted the blanket next to me so we might rest together. “And if she’d rather spend her days felting and cooking your stew?”

“She can learn it all,” he answered. I let my husband curl around me,
his warmth seeping into my battered bones and flesh as he stroked Alaqai’s forehead. I wanted that moment to last forever, yet his next words stole the breath from my lungs. “I’d die before I let anyone touch you, or the children,” he said. “And that day may yet come.”

I couldn’t imagine a life without Genghis now, or our family. They had filled my heart and made me whole again, but also left me vulnerable. “Train her, then, but know that nothing is going to happen to you.”

I’d endured much already, but I doubted I’d survive if tragedy ever befell my children.

*   *   *

After the Field of Cauldrons, it seemed we played a child’s game of find-and-catch with Jamuka. We would charge and he would feint; then we would switch places, neither side gaining any discernible advantage.

One night while the boys were with their father—Alaqai was a fussy baby and her screams often drove them to sleep with the horses—Mother Khogaghchin shuffled into my tent, closing my new birchwood door behind her. My husband’s raids had yet to end the war, but they occasionally brought a wealth of trade goods from the south and the east, precious salts and iron weapons and finally even a proper door, emblazoned with painted images of the Five Snouts that never failed to entrance Alaqai.

I was already abed that night, bone weary from a long day of tending to my daughter and beating felt with the other women. Khogaghchin’s white hair framed her leathery face like the glow of the moon, and for a moment I glimpsed what she might have been as a young woman, strong and determined. Then I blinked and the image was gone, replaced with an old and feeble crone.

She sat at my bedside, her hands cool and dry over mine. “I’ve come to sit by you, Borte Ujin,” she said.

I moved to rise, but she clucked her tongue at me. “Rest, daughter of my heart. You’ve earned it, spending your days caring for us all with little thought to your own spirit.” She paused for breath, bracing her hands against her knees for support. “I realized tonight when I couldn’t sleep that I am now an old woman, and you are my family. I thought I might sleep better closer to you.”

“Then rest,” I said, although I knew her snores—louder than an ill camel’s—would keep me from my own sleep all night. I’d manage so long as she didn’t wake Alaqai.

Khogaghchin lay next to me, but I drifted to sleep first. I woke not to the rumble of her snores but to utter silence, not even the gentle crackle of the fire, which had burned out in the night. My hand brushed hers, but this time it was cold.

“Mother Khogaghchin?” I leaned closer to feel her cheek, but it, too, was cold. Only the smile on her lips was still warm, reminding me of the day I’d first met her as a new bride.

I was mother to a nation and I would never let my people see me cry, but I raised my voice to guide her spirit to the sacred mountains, then broke down and sobbed in the darkness of my own tent, pulling Alaqai to my chest and crying for the second mother I’d lost.

We bleached Mother Khogaghchin’s bones in the sun and buried them with the honor of a woman who had birthed fifteen children. I erected her
ger
near my mother’s, one stark white and the other dulled by the sun, both providing me solace. It was there that Alaqai took her first steps, and for a moment I imagined both my mother and Khogaghchin smiling down on us. Time raced ahead without us, whether we wished it to or not.

Alaqai grew out of her fussiness and weaned herself, giving us a glimpse of the independent streak that none of my sons possessed. My only daughter was a terror, racing about camp on her pony and flashing the most adorable smile while stealing cups of salted milk. I trembled to think of the havoc she would wreak once she was older.

With no child at my breast, I quickly fell pregnant again, much to my husband’s horror. The clans watched my stomach swell, scheming amongst themselves as to which woman might replace me as khatun if I died in the birthing tent, and each night Genghis and Hoelun prayed to the Eternal Blue Sky for my safe delivery.

I was determined to enjoy these months of what I knew would be my final pregnancy, even going so far as to dry extra goat meat until the rafters creaked from the added weight, all in preparation for what might be the last months I would spend with my family. It was a difficult pregnancy,
with my swollen ankles and growing inability to sleep, and I grew more terrified of entering the birthing tent with each passing day, although I tried to put on a brave face before Genghis and the children.

When my time came, I struggled even more than I had with Alaqai, for my body had not yet fully healed. After the first full day, I begged Hoelun to cut me open and remove the child, but instead she pressed on my stomach so hard I screamed, turning the child lodged there.

My last child was born amidst my cries, tearing me apart inside as Alaqai had done outside.

A son.

“There will be no more children,” Hoelun commanded me as the afterbirth emerged. This time I could only nod. We named our son Tolui, after the three stones that make up the hearth at the center of our
gers
. Tolui would be our Prince of the Hearth, who would care for us in our final years.

I hadn’t the strength to feed my son, so a Merkid slave whose babe had died was brought to give him suck. At the time, I envied the girl her youth and round breasts as my milk dried up in a final punishment of excruciating pain, but I wondered later if she had made him weak, if perhaps my milk would have made him as strong as his brothers. Still, Genghis treated me as a precious bride, feeding me bits of sheep fat with his own fingers as I struggled to recover.

“You’ve given me four sons and one demon of a daughter,” Genghis said, wiping away my tears as I focused my eyes on the dried horse and goat meat hanging above my head. It was two weeks since the birth and still the world spun underfoot when I tried to rise. I’d scarcely managed to bathe my son today and, exhausted, had left the fouled water in its iron basin, where a spotted goat now lapped it up. “I order you to rest and recover,” Genghis said. “For I need my khatun.”

Yet what kind of khatun could no longer welcome her husband into her bed, to join with him and create new life? I struggled to find a new role for myself, and finally it was Hoelun who gave me the words I needed.

“You are mother of the People of the Felt,” she said. “You told me that once, before the Field of Cauldrons, and now you must act the part. Eat and rest to regain your strength.”

“But Genghis—”

Hoelun waved away my concern. “Surely you are not so dull a wife that you cannot think of ways to please my son without opening your legs to him.”

My face burned the same fire as the flames in my hearth then. “I’ll think of something,” I mumbled, not wanting the conversation to continue.

Hoelun cackled and patted my leg. “That’s my girl,” she said. “Now, drink your calf’s blood and I’ll bring you more sheep fat. I’ll get some color back in your face if it’s the last thing I do.”

*   *   *

Slowly, I regained my strength, but Tolui had already been fitted for a saddle by the time I felt well enough to resume all my duties, and I still grew short of breath and required frequent rests to keep my head from spinning.

As the willow buds unfurled their fuzzy heads and sent out yellow sprigs of pollen, we finally garnered enough support from the clans to declare war against the Tatars, the mountain clan that Jamuka had allied himself with before Jochi’s birth. Our soldiers mounted their horses with the men of Ong Khan, the great leader who still wore the black sable furs I’d brought to my marriage. Together, the men attacked the Tatar fortress in the Ulja River valley, nestled amongst the birch and larch.

The men were gone for days while we women performed our chores and tended the children. We should have been used to the long waits and constant doubts, but we scarcely slept by night, and by day, our tempers frayed as eyes darted constantly to the horizon.

Finally, the thunder of hooves and cloud of dust heralded their return. Tasting the familiar tang of fear and excitement as we waited to hear what the battle had brought, I untethered Tolui from the rope that kept him from the hearth fire and herded the children like goats to meet their father. Ogodei yawned into his hand—there was little in this world that could interest that son of mine outside food and wrestling—but Jochi held Alaqai on his shoulders. My sweet boy was now a gangly youth who had begun to braid his hair like a man, and my heart stalled to realize he would soon ride out with the men.