Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [81]
Since it was winter, he was covered with thick furs although, hidden beneath were underclothes of the finest Chinese silk. He wore felt socks, and over them heavy leather boots. On his head was a fur cap.
He was, in fact, twenty-five, but wind and weather, war and the hard living on the open steppe had made his age seem indeterminate.
Tied to his belt was a leather drinking pouch containing the fomented mare’s milk – kumiss – that his people loved. Attached to his saddle was another pouch, containing dried meat. For as a Mongol warrior, he always travelled with all the bare essentials that he needed.
These also included his wife: together with a baby, she rode with the huge camel train that carried the baggage behind.
There was only one physical characteristic that distinguished this warrior from other men. Four years before, a spear had just missed his left eye but made a gash from his high cheekbone, across the side of his head, and taken off his ear, leaving only a jagged stump. ‘I was lucky,’ he had remarked, and thought little more about it.
His name was Mengu.
Slowly the vast army rode across the frozen steppe. As usual, it was drawn up in five large contingents of roughly equal size: two – a vanguard and a rearguard – on each wing; and in the centre, a single division.
Mengu was on the right wing. Behind him rode the hundred men he led. They were light horsemen, each carrying two bows and two quivers with which they could shoot at the gallop. The bows were fearsome – very large, composite, with a pull of over one hundred and sixty pounds – more powerful, that is, than the famous English longbow. They had a destructive range of up to three hundred yards. Like all his men, Mengu had first learned to draw a bow when he was three.
To his left moved a party of heavy cavalry who carried sabres and lances, a battle axe or mace, according to preference, and a lasso.
Mengu himself rode a coal-black horse – a fact which at once marked him out as belonging to the black brigade of the elite imperial guard. With the great herd of spare horses behind went his four remounts, all black.
He was glad his wife and firstborn son were with him. He wanted them to see his triumph. For this was his first command.
The Mongol army, and the empire that grew from it, was modelled on the decimal system. The lowest command was ten men. Then a hundred. The senior men commanded a thousand, and the generals led the myriads, the ten thousands. Mengu commanded a hundred. ‘But by the end of the campaign,’ he promised his wife, ‘I’ll have a thousand.’ And by the time the rest of the western lands were conquered, the lands which merchants had told him stretched to the end of the plain, he might even lead a myriad, a ten thousand.
Promotion: how he desired it. But one had to be careful.
For although all men were equal in the service of the Great Khan, and promotion was on merit, the most important things were judgement and tact. The old proverb of the Asian steppe said it all: ‘If you know too much they’ll hang you, and if you’re too modest, they’ll walk all over you.’
It also helped to belong to a successful clan. ‘And I am,’ he mused, using the Mongol phrase, ‘of the same bone as two generals already.’ That had helped him get into the imperial guard.
There was another factor, however, which he thought might advance him even more.
In the beauty contests which the Great Khan regularly held, to which all the prominent Mongols sent their daughters, his sister had been singled out. ‘A moon-like girl,’ the Great Khan himself had remarked: this was a high term of praise. She had been allotted, as a senior concubine, to Batu Khan himself. Several times he had seen her by the khan’s tent.
She will find a way to bring me to his notice, he thought confidently. And his hard, impassive face looked towards the horizon with satisfaction.
Soon, Mengu knew, they would reach the edge of the forest.
In the twelve-year animal calendar of the Mongols, there were two years to go until the year of the Rat. By the end