Lords of the Bow (38 page)

A month out from Yenking, the outskirts of the desert realm were in sight and the tribes halted by a river to take on water for the trip. It was there that the last of the scouts Genghis had left behind came riding into camp. Two of them did not join their friends around the campfires and instead rode straight to the khan’s ger on its cart.

Kachiun and Arslan were there with Genghis and all three men came out to hear the final report. They watched as the two scouts dismounted stiffly. Both were caked in dust and dirt and Genghis exchanged a glance with his brother, swallowing against a twitch of his tortured throat.

“My lord khan,” one of the scouts began. He swayed as he stood and Genghis wondered what could have made the man ride himself to exhaustion.

“The emperor has left Yenking, lord, heading south. More than a thousand went with him.”

“He ran?” Genghis demanded in disbelief.

“South, lord. The city was left open, abandoned behind him. I did not stay to see how many people survived inside. The emperor took many more carts and slaves, every one of his ministers.”

No one else spoke as they waited for Genghis to cough into a closed fist, straining for air.

“I gave him peace,” Genghis said at last. “Yet he shouts to the world that my word means nothing to him.”

“What does it matter, brother?” Kachiun began. “Khasar is in the south. No city would dare give sanctuary—”

Genghis silenced him with a furious gesture. “I will not go back to that place, Kachiun. But there is a price for all things. He has broken the peace I offered him to run to his armies in the south. Now you will show him the result.”

“Brother?” Kachiun asked.

“No, Kachiun! I have had enough of games. Take your men back to that plain and burn Yenking to the ground. That is the price I will have from him.”

Under his brother’s fury, Kachiun could only bow his head.

“Your will, my lord,” he said.

HISTORICAL NOTE

Nature has left this tincture in the blood,
That all men would be tyrants if they could.
—
DANIEL DEFOE

The birthdate of Genghis can only ever be estimated. Given the nomadic nature of the Mongol tribes, the year and location of his birth were never marked. In addition, small tribes would record the years in terms of local events, making it hard to match to calendars of the day. It is only when Genghis comes into contact with the larger world that the dates are known with any certainty. He invaded the Xi Xia region south of the Gobi in 1206
A.D.
and was proclaimed khan of all the tribes in the same year. In the Chinese calendars, that was the year of Fire and of the Tiger, at the end of the Taihe era. He may have been as young as twenty-five or as old as thirty-eight when he united his people. I have not dwelled on the years of war and alliances as he slowly brought the great tribes together under his command. Interesting as that was, his story always had a wider scope. I recommend
The Secret History of the Mongols,
translated by Arthur Waley, for anyone wishing to know more of that period.

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The Naiman alliance was the last major coalition to resist being swept up into the new nation. The khan of the Naimans did climb Mount Nakhu, moving further and further up the slopes as the army of Genghis advanced. Genghis offered to spare his bondsmen, but they refused and he had them killed to the last man. The rest of the warriors and families were absorbed into his own forces.

Kokchu was a powerful shaman, also known as Teb-Tenggeri. Little is known of exactly how he became influential. Both Hoelun and Borte complained to Genghis about him at various points. His ability to influence Genghis became a great source of concern for those around the khan. Genghis himself believed in a single sky father: deism supported by the spirit world of shamanism. Kokchu remains something of an enigma. One law of the tribes was that it was forbidden to shed royal blood or that of holy men. I have not yet finished telling his story.

As the tribes gathered to Genghis’s call, the khan of the Uighurs wrote a declaration of loyalty almost exactly as I have it here. However, the incident of Khasar being beaten and Temuge forced to kneel involved sons of the Khongkhotan clan rather than the Woyela.

Genghis did flood the plain of the Xi Xia and was forced to retreat before the rising waters. Although it must have been embarrassing, the destruction of the crops brought the king to the negotiating table and eventually won a vassal for the Mongol people. It would not have been Genghis’s first encounter with the idea of paying tribute. Mongol tribes were known to negotiate in this way, though never on this scale. It is interesting to consider what Genghis must have made of the riches of the Xi Xia and, later, the emperor’s own city. He had no use for personal possessions beyond those he could carry on his horse. Tribute would have impressed the tribes and signaled his dominance, but otherwise had very little practical use.

The outcome for the Xi Xia might have been different if Prince Wei of the Chin empire had answered the call for aid. His message (in translation) was: “It is to our advantage when our enemies attack one another. Wherein lies the danger to us?”

When Genghis went round the Great Wall of China, he did so only by accident. His path to Yenking through Xi Xia lands neatly circumvented the wall. However, it is important to understand that the wall was a solid obstacle only in the mountains around Yenking—later known as Peking, then Beijing today. In other places, the wall was broken, or no more than a rampart of earth with an occasional guard post. In later centuries, the wall was joined into one continuous barrier to invasion.

It is worth noting that the Western pronunciation of Chinese place-names is always an approximation, using an alien alphabet to create the same sound. Thus,
Xi Xia
is sometimes rendered as
Tsi-Tsia,
or
Hsi-Hsia,
and
Chin
is sometimes written as
Jin
or even
Kin. Sung
is written as
Song
in some texts. I have managed to find twenty-one spellings of
Genghis,
from the exotic
Gentchiscan
and
Tchen-Kis
to the more prosaic
Jingis, Chinggis, Jengiz,
and
Gengis.
The Mongolian word
ordo
or
ordu
means camp or general headquarters. From this we derive the word
horde.
Some dictionaries give the word
shaman
as a word of Mongolian origin, and the Gurkhas of Nepal could well derive their name from
Gurkhan,
or khan of khans.

Genghis had four legitimate sons. As with all Mongol names, there are differences in spelling, much as the word
Shakespeare
is occasionally written as
Shaksper,
or
Boadicea
as
Boudicca. Jochi
is sometimes seen as
Juji, Chagatai
as
Jagatai, Ogedai
as
Ogdai.
His last son was Tolui, sometimes written as
Tule.

As well as the Xi Xia princess, Genghis often accepted wives from his beaten enemies. One of his later decrees made all Mongol children legitimate, though the ruling did not seem to affect the right to inherit among his own sons.

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Walled cities were always a problem for Genghis. At the time of his attack on Yenking, that city was surrounded by fortress villages containing granaries and an arsenal. There were moats around the city walls and the walls themselves were almost fifty feet thick at the base, rising as high. The city had thirteen well-constructed gates and what is still the longest canal in the world, stretching more than a thousand miles south and east to Hangzhou. Most of the world’s capital cities have their beginnings on the shores of a great river. Beijing was built around three great lakes—Beihei to the north, Zhonghai (or Songhai) in the center, and Nanhai to the south. It may well be the oldest continuously occupied human settlement, as evidence of inhabitants has been found from nearly half a million years ago—Peking Man, as he is sometimes known.

At the time of Genghis’s attack through the pass of the Badger’s Mouth, Yenking had undergone a period of growth that resulted in walls five miles in circumference and a population of a quarter of a million households, or approximately a million people. It is possible to imagine as many as half a million more who would not show up on any official count. Even then, the famous “Forbidden City” within the walls and the emperor’s Summer Palace (destroyed by British and French soldiers in 1860) had not yet been built. Today, the city has a population of approximately
fifteen
million people, and it is possible to drive through the pass that was once host to one of the bloodiest battles in history. That too is a known date: 1211
A.D.
Genghis had been leader of his people for five years at that point. He was in the prime of his physical strength and fought with his men. It is unlikely that he was much older than forty, but he may have been as young as thirty, as I have written here.

The battle of Badger’s Mouth pass is regarded as one of Genghis’s greatest victories. Vastly outnumbered and unable to maneuver, he sent men to flank the enemy, climbing mountains the Chin thought were impassable. The Chin cavalry were routed back into their own lines by the Mongol horse, and even ten years later, skeletons littered the ground around that place for
thirty miles.
With the usual problems of anglicized pronunciation, the pass is known in earlier works as
Yuhung,
which roughly translates as “Badger.”

Having lost the battle, General Zhi Zhong did indeed return and slay the young emperor, appointing another while he ruled as regent.

The city of Yenking was made to be impregnable and there were almost a thousand guard towers on the walls. Each one was defended by enormous crossbows that could fire a huge arrow two-thirds of a mile. In addition, they had trebuchet catapults capable of firing heavy loads for hundreds of yards over the walls. They had gunpowder and were just beginning to use it in war, though at this time it would have formed part of the defenses. Their catapults could have launched clay pots filled with distilled oil—petrol. Assaulting such a city fortress would have broken the back of the Mongol army, so they chose to devastate the country around it and starve Yenking to surrender.

It took four years and the inhabitants of Yenking were reduced to eating their own dead by the time they opened the gates and surrendered in 1215. Genghis accepted the surrender along with tribute of unimaginable value. He then traveled back to the grasslands of his youth, as he did throughout his life. With the siege ended, the emperor fled south. Though he did not turn back himself, Genghis sent an army to the city to take vengeance. Parts of Yenking burned for a month.

Despite his hatred of the Chin, Genghis would not be the one who would see them occupied and subdued at last. That would fall to his sons and grandson Kubla. At the peak of his success, he left China and went west. It is true that the Islamic rulers refused to recognize his authority, but Genghis was too much of a visionary to react without thought. It is an odd fact, usually glossed over in the histories, that he left China when it was ready to fall at his feet. Perhaps it is simply because he was distracted from his hatred by the challenge of the Shah of Khwarazm, Ala-ud-dun-Mohammed. Genghis was not a man to let any challenge go unanswered. In fact, he seemed to revel in them.

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He understood the idea of nations and laws, slowly developing his own code, called the Yasa.

“If the great, the military leaders and the leaders of the many descendants of the ruler who will be born in the future, should not adhere strictly to the Yasa, then the power of the state will be shattered and come to an end. No matter how they seek Genghis Khan, they will not find him,” he declared.

In this, we see the visionary who could dream nations out of scattered tribes and understand what it entailed to rule across such a vast land.

The system of white tent, red tent, black tent, was used by Genghis as I have described. It was propaganda of a sort, designed to have cities fall quickly from fear. With grazing always an issue for the Mongol herds, prolonged sieges were to be avoided if possible. It suited neither their temperaments nor Genghis’s style of warfare, where speed and mobility were central factors. In a similar way, driving enemies toward a city to strain their resources is ruthless common sense. In some ways, Genghis was the ultimate pragmatist, but one feature of Mongol warfare is worth mentioning: revenge. The line “We have lost many good men” was often used to justify an all-out attack after a setback.

He was also willing to try new techniques and weapons, such as the long lance. The bow would always be the weapon of choice for Mongol cavalry, but they used the lance in exactly the same way as medieval knights, as an immensely successful heavy charge weapon against infantry and other horsemen.

Deception is another key to understanding many of the Mongol victories. Genghis and the men who served under him regarded a straight fight almost as discreditable. Victories won by cunning brought far more honor, and they always looked for a way to fool the enemy they faced, whether it was a false withdrawal, hidden reserves, or even straw dummies on spare horses to give the illusion of reserves they didn’t actually have. It may interest some to consider that Baden-Powell took exactly the same approach in his defense of Mafeking seven centuries later, with dummy minefields, sending the men to lay invisible barbed wire and all manner of tricks and ruses. Some things don’t change.

The incident where Jelme sucked blood from Genghis’s neck is an interesting one. No mention of poison survives, but how else can the action be explained? It is not necessary to suck clotted blood from a neck wound. It does not aid healing, and in fact, the act could burst artery walls already weak from the cut. The historical incident took place earlier than I have it here, but it was so extraordinary that I could not leave it out. It is the sort of incident that tends to be rewritten in history, if perhaps a partially successful assassination attempt was seen as dishonorable.

One event from the histories that I did not use was when a banished and starving tribesman took hold of Genghis’s youngest son, Tolui, and drew a knife. We cannot know what he intended, as he was killed quickly by Jelme and others.

Such events might help to explain why, when the Mongols later came into contact with the original Arab Assassins, they stopped at nothing to destroy them.

Genghis was far from invincible and was wounded many times in his battles. Yet luck was always with him and he survived again and again—perhaps deserving the belief his men had in him, that he was blessed and destined to conquer.

A note on distances traveled: One of the chief advantages of the Mongol army was that it could turn up just about anywhere in a surprise attack. There are well-attested records of covering 600 miles in nine days, at 70 miles per day, or more extreme rides of 140 miles in a day with the rider still able to continue. The greatest rides involved changes of ponies, but Marco Polo records Mongol messengers covering 250 miles between sunrise and dark. In winter, the incredibly hardy ponies are turned loose. They eat enough snow to satisfy their thirst and are adept at digging through it to find sustenance beneath. When the Franciscan monk John de Plano Carpini crossed the plains to visit Kubla Khan, then at Karakorum, the Mongols advised him to change his horses for Mongol ponies or see them starve to death. They had no such worry for the ponies. Western horses have been bred for brute strength in breeds like the Suffolk Punch horse, or for racing speed. They have never been bred for endurance.

The incident of falling petals is true. Up to sixty thousand young girls threw themselves from the walls of Yenking rather than see it fall to the invader.