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By Root 1721 0

encountered a border guard who, refusing to believe that the solitary old man was the renowned warrior khan of the Kereyid, killed him. They said that to atone for the killing of Ong Khan, the Naiman queen had his head brought to her and placed on a sacred white cloth of felt in the position of honor at the back of the ger, opposite the door, where she could make offerings and prayers to it. Nothing could be more offensive to Mongol sensibilities than such a bloody item inside the home, and nothing could be more dangerous than the head, the seat of Ong Khan’s soul. According to the story, however, she ordered a musician to play the morin huur, the horsehead fiddle, while her daughters-in-law sang and danced for the head and she made ceremonial offerings of wine to it as though Ong Khan were still alive and an honored guest in her ger. When Tayang Khan, the Naiman ruler, entered and saw the severed head, he panicked and shouted in horrified anger that the head had smiled at him. Whereupon, he kicked the head off the sacred felt cloth and then trampled it to pieces.

Such stories offered assurance that the old khan was truly dead, and at the same time they heaped shame and opprobrium on the court of the Naiman, the next target of Temujin’s campaign. Propaganda and control of public opinion were quickly emerging as Temujin’s primary weapons of choice. The Mongols spread stories among their supporters accusing the aging Tayang Khan of having disintegrated into an imbecile and weakling whose wife and son despised and shamed him in public. To build anger among their followers against the enemy, the Mongol leaders spread the story that the Naiman queen despised Mongols as dirty and smelly savages. Using gossip as a way to build confidence in their own men and to weaken the enemy’s resolve, the Mongols reported that the son of Tayang Khan mockingly called him Old Woman Tayang, and that he would not venture any farther from his ger than would a pregnant woman going to piss.

At the same time that they spread such strange stories about the Naiman court, the Mongols boosted their own spirits with stories of how afraid the Naiman were of them. Since Jamuka had joined the Naiman, stories circulated of how he would terrify them with descriptions of Temujin’s warriors. The Secret History recounted the horrific description of the Mongols in proud detail: “They have chisels for noses and sharp awls for tongues. They can live by eating the dew and riding the wind.” They compared Temujin to a starved falcon, but also said that “his whole body is made from copper and iron fastened so tightly together that no awl could penetrate it.”

By contrast to this description, the first Mongol captured by a Naiman advance guard rode a horse so skinny with a saddle so primitive that the captors sent the horse and saddle from camp to camp in mockery to convince their fellow Naiman of how pathetic the Mongols had become. Temujin responded to the captured horsemen episode with another trick. Since he had far fewer soldiers than the Naiman, Temujin ordered each man to set five campfires every night on the hills where his army camped. From a distance, the small army appeared much larger, since they seemed to have “more fires than the stars in the sky.”

The final battle for control of Mongolia came in 1204, the Year of the Rat, about three hundred miles west of Burkhan Khaldun. In the days leading up to the battle, Temujin tested his new military organization based on squads of ten. Rather than committing to an all-out battle, which he might easily lose because of his smaller numbers, Temujin picked at the Naiman with small and unpredictable hit-and-run skirmishes. In the first episode, Temujin ordered his men to advance in what was called the Moving Bush or Tumbleweed Formation just before daylight. Rather than large units racing in to attack, the dispersed squads of ten advanced severally and silently from different directions while keeping their profiles low in the predawn darkness. This prevented the enemy from seeing how many there were or from preparing