Until the Sun Falls (3 page)

“The Kha-Khan summoned me.”

Sidacai sat on his heels. Reaching behind him, he dragged a fur cloak from the couch and arranged it over his shoulders. “If I go mad from being bitten I shall curse you always. Why do they want you? For the China war?”

“I’m to go with Sabotai to Batu. I suspect he’s having difficulty with the Altun.”

“Hunh. The Russians, then. Dull fighting. But you’ve always liked new places.”

“I’ve been there before. You’re going up to the Lake and play Khan. Tshant comes with me.”

Sidacai only stared a moment. Finally he lifted his cup and drained it. “I am no khan.”

“You’ll learn.”

“I know nothing of it.”

“My brothers will help you. And Malekai.”

“I’d rather stay here.”

“Jagatai will order you back.”

“Why you?”

“Sabotai requested me, I think.”

“Have you seen the Kha-Khan?”

“Yes.”

Sidacai turned his head and bellowed for a slave. He poured more kumiss into his cup. “They don’t trust you. They hate you. Don’t go.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe they want to kill you. Far away where no one will care.”

“These Khans don’t hate me, and they trust me or I wouldn’t have commanded six tumans in Korea. If Temujin never had me killed Ogodai won’t. And it was Sabotai who asked for me. I’m sure of that.”

“Are you taking Mother?”

Psin nodded. “And Artai.”

“You are so trusting.”

Psin shrugged. He pulled at his mustache, his eyes on Sidacai. “Well, I’ll keep it in mind. Now I’ve got to go. Sabotai wants to leave quickly. You ride post horse to the Lake and when you find the clan send Tshant straight to the Volga—Batu has a main camp there. Tell him to take his mother and your mother and two yurts and the necessary slaves and my dun horse.”

Sidacai nodded. “Will he go?”

“He’ll go or face me for it.” Psin scowled. “What do you mean, will he go?”

“You know how he is.”

“You tell him that I sent for him on the Kha-Khan’s order.” He stood up. “You might say I have no desire whatsoever to command over him again, after Korea.”

Sidacai’s head bobbed. “Do you want her?” He jabbed an elbow at the Hindi girl.

“No. I have all the women I can handle right now. And you know how I hate music.”

Psin had fought two campaigns in Korea. The first, a reconnaissance raid, had been the kind of fighting he liked best: very fast, very hard, and more dangerous than usual. On the second campaign he had taken Tshant, his eldest living son, and two of Temujin’s grandsons, the Altun Mongke and Kubulai, as tuman commanders. Tshant and Mongke were deadly enemies.

“Fighting Koreans was a relief,” he said to Sabotai. “Do you remember how Jebe and Mukali fought?”

Sabotai grinned quickly between swallows. They were eating in a waystation on the road to the Volga camp, and the food was so bad that they gulped it to keep from tasting it.

“Once I went into my yurt and Tshant had Mongke down and was strangling him,” Psin said. He had finished eating. A bit of limp cheese lay before him on the table; he pressed one forefinger into it and studied the fingerprint. “A couple of days later Mongke knocked Tshant off his horse and tried to trample him.”

“How did you get them apart?” Sabotai said. He set his bowl down and wiped his chin. Particles of meat clung to his beard.

“I? A lowly Merkit, a subchief, nothing more than the father-in-law of one of the Altun women, come between the woman’s husband and her cousin in a friendly argument? I kept them riding in opposite directions.”

Sabotai laughed and yawned. “This campaign should be interesting.”

“How much trouble do the Altun give you?”

Sabotai leaned back. Slaves moved around them, clearing the table and fetching kumiss. The waystation was all but empty; a balding captain dozed beside the door, and the smoke settled just over Sabotai’s head.

“Buri and Quyuk are closer than two out of the same womb. They hate Batu. In a council Batu’s brothers will support him on any issue. Anywhere else they quarrel among themselves. Baidar and Kaidu are the brightest and steadiest of the lot, if you want my opinion. Kaidu is a pleasant youngster, you’ll like him. Kadan is a damned drunk and keeps to himself. He hates Quyuk more than anything else in the world, and he rather likes Batu because of it. You’d never know he and Quyuk are brothers. Mongke hates everybody.”

“Even you?”

“Me he likes. Is that a compliment or the worst sort of insult?”

Psin undid the laces of his tunic. “A compliment. Mongke I know, of course. I fought under Batu once, against the Muslims, and I know his brothers well enough to say they’re nothing. But the others—are they good commanders?”

Sabotai shrugged one shoulder. “They’re all young, except Batu and Baidar. They are brave. They’ve brought their personal armies, thank God, so that we have Mongols for troops instead of Kipchaks who won’t learn or can’t.”

“Mongke’s men don’t follow him well enough for my liking.”

The night wind dragged at the yurt. Sabotai stretched his arms over his head, glanced at the captain snoring by the door, and dropped his hands to the table top. “What’s wrong with Mongke?”

“Nothing much. He can’t command three crippled oxen and a shaman’s cart in a pitched battle, but he’ll raid as well as any of us.”

Sabotai’s chest swelled up. He held his breath a moment and let it out with a sigh. “You must know what I mean. He’s not trustworthy.”

“He has a vivid imagination. He can see just what an enemy should do to crush him into little bits. So he runs before they can.”

“He’s a coward.”

“Say that to his face.” Psin yawned until the bones in his jaw cracked. Sabotai’s lips quivered; obviously he was resisting a yawn himself.

A slave came in and prostrated himself on the floor. “My lords, your horses wait.”

Sabotai groaned. “I’m dying for some sleep.”

“Wait until the next station,” Psin said. “Come along.”

They rode steadily west, through desert bordered by blue mountains. Twice a day they reached waystations, changed horses, and rode on. They got little sleep. Psin thought Sabotai was worried about what was happening in the Volga camp and the city called Bulgar while he was gone. Sometimes, when they had reached the second waystation of the day early in the evening, they rode on all night, dozing in the saddle, a rope tied between their horses.

Twice they met caravans going west—the camels, swaying on their great feet over the stony ground, reminded Psin of the Muslims who had spoken of the Franks of Outremer. He spent half the night in a waystation talking to the men of one caravan in his rusty Arabic. The camel drivers, from Damascus, mentioned the Franks even before Psin could ask.

“How do they fight?” Psin said.

“By the Compassionate God,” the head driver said. He raised his hands and eyes toward the ceiling. “When they are on ground of their own choosing, there is nothing that can meet their charges. There was one, now long gone from Outremer, who stood head and shoulders taller than you, lord.”

Psin glanced at Sabotai, who was listening. Sabotai said, “Taller than you?” He sounded shocked.

“And as broad,” the Damascene said. “He was a Norman. The stories are still told of him. He was king of Antioch.”

“They use swords,” Psin said.

“Lances also. They don’t throw them, they hold them, thus.” The Damascene locked his elbow against his side and held his hand palm up before him, the fingers curled around an unseen lance haft. “Their charge is terrible.”

Psin smiled, so that his eyes narrowed. “Mongols don’t usually wait to be charged.”

One of the other Arabs laughed softly. The head driver said, “All the world knows that Mongols are the greatest fighters.”

“Someday we’ll fight Franks, maybe, and see.” Psin looked at Sabotai.

“I can’t understand more than a few words,” Sabotai said. “My Arabic’s gone bad, and I’m sleepy.”

Psin glanced around at the Arabs. In the low firelight their faces shone; their dark eyes were full of unease and soft fear. Sabotai lay back and pulled his coat over him. Psin finished his kumiss.

“Your God be compassionate,” he said to the Arabs. They smiled, quick to try to please him, and he laughed in their faces. “Take my regards to your khan, whoever he is.”

He lay down, his face away from the fire, and slept with the faint scent of Arab in his nostrils.

They left long before dawn, crossed the river there, and headed on west. Psin was beginning to feel that his legs fit the saddle better than the ground. Sabotai was older than he was, and he watched for signs of failing strength, but Sabotai only grumbled more and walked very stiffly when they dismounted.

On the twenty-first day they came to the place where they had to leave the main road and travel north. The waystation lay in a bowl of valley, shockingly green after the desert; wells bubbled up out of the ground all around the site of an old city. Only a few huts stood, scattered through the valley, and the hillside they rode over was white with old bones. The flat ground of the valley was covered with apricot trees, so that the air was full of the smell of overripe fruit.

“We burnt this city when we fought the Kara-Khitai,” Sabotai said.

Psin reined in and looked. Far across the valley he could see the snowy tops of high mountains, but the dusty haze hid the slopes. “Yes, I remember—there was a mosque—it stood there. And the wall had spikes over it. When we came down here, it was just after a rainstorm, and we could see the mountains. You can’t see them now, only the tops.”

Sabotai frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

“I do. I stormed the wall.” Psin recalled something else of that battle and hunched his shoulders. “There were four gates to the city, and their banners were white with green markings.”

“Ayuh. I remember. You’re right. God above, you were young then.”

“Younger than Mongke.” He kicked his horse up; the memory made him nervous.

“Long ago,” Sabotai said. “Ah, well.” He reined his horse around a knot of low bushes. “That was Temujin’s first great campaign—he made no mistakes in it. Before then he was sometimes wrong.”

“He learned,” Psin said. He slipped his feet out of the stirrups and let them dangle. The soles of his feet were numb from pressing against the stirrup bars. “No man could say anything greater of him—he learned.”

“Oh, he had some other virtues,” Sabotai said.

Psin grunted. The campaign against the Kara-Khitai had been his third under Temujin, and the first in which he had commanded his own tuman. Before then he had seen Temujin only from great distances, riding through the camp, with his aides like hawks swooping around him, and the glitter of his name fencing him off from the unworthy.

“You were not ordered to storm the city,” Temujin had said.

No, my Khan.

“You were ordered to encircle and wait for the rest of the army to join you.”

Yes, my Khan.

“You disobeyed me, child. I won’t tolerate that. Look at me, child. If you face my enemies, you can face me.”

No, my Khan.

Temujin’s soft voice, so quiet, had told him for half the day what the penalties were for disobedience, had told him how lucky he was that he had succeeded. Psin remembered quivering under that gentle voice.

“If you had failed, child, there would now be so little left of you that a jackal would starve over your bones.”

Who would save me if he wished me dead? For years afterward when he heard Temujin’s voice his stomach contracted and his mouth dried up.

Now he and Sabotai picked their way through the ruins of the city wall; the grass had grown up over the stones. No stone stood high enough to be seen above the grass. Greener grass in rectangles showed where houses had stood; weeds and wild herbs sprouted in the streets and seeded into the wind that no wall broke. The light was strange, as if the haze diluted it.

Temujin’s power had lain banked in his eyes: green like this new grass they glowed sometimes in Psin’s dreams and when he woke he spent the following day uncertain and haunted. Even Jebe had flinched before Temujin’s gaze.

“What are you thinking about?” Sabotai said.

They had been standing for some time in front of a yurt. Psin mumbled something and dismounted. Sabotai showed the station captain their credentials; he talked to him in a firm cold voice, arranging for a change of horses. Psin walked over to a bush and made water. When he was through he saw that the bush grew up out of a matrix of dry bones. 

The Black Merkits wintered at the southern end of Lake Baikal
, on the choice pasture and the teeming forest along the river there. Sidacai had no trouble finding the head camp. Before Temujin had come, the Black Merkits had fought over this pasturage with a clan of Uirats, more numerous and richer; the Merkits had grazed the land for generations, and only that had kept them coming back, year after year, to pay for it in blood. Temujin had given them this land for all time, and now they could stretch their camp along the river basin for three days’ ride.

Tshant’s yurts stood in a horseshoe bend in the river. Sidacai found them in the middle of the day. Some women were washing; his mother of course wasn’t with them. He rode on past, hearing their laughter and gossiping voices while they sloshed the laundry in the big tubs by the river. Dogs and children and a little flock of piebald goats sprinkled the high grass in the horseshoe. The yurts made an orderly curve along the bank.

Tshant was always orderly. Sidacai thought of that and wrinkled his nose. He reined in before the biggest of the four yurts and called, “Brother? Will no one welcome the returning warrior?”

The yurt door was open, and when he dismounted he could see Tshant’s wife, Kerulu, inside sewing felt. She looked over at him. Her bright hair, the hair of Temujin’s family, gleamed in the light from the fire.

“Tshant,” she called. “Sidacai’s come back.” 

“Ah?”

Deep inside the yurt something heavy and careless rolled over, grunted, and made its way to the door. Tshant walked stooped out into the sunlight and straightened. He stared at Sidacai.