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By Root 902 0

a valuable trophy for which many different factions would pay dearly. Esen’s men surmised precisely what had happened, and they began scouring the area for the hidden child. Realizing that the pursuers were closing in on the hiding place, one of Samur’s men raced his horse directly at the spot. Esen’s men saw him and also headed in the same direction. They were too close for the rescuer to dismount and pick up the infant. He had only one chance to swoop by the hiding place, bend down without stopping, and hook the child with the end of his bow. The bow caught on the cradle, and with one powerful lunge of his arm, he tossed the cradle high into the air, above and out in front of the horse. As the cradle fell back toward the earth, the man caught it perfectly and securely. Without breaking speed, he managed to outrun Esen’s men.

The escapees traveled for weeks, deep into Mongol territory. There they entrusted the boy to the care of a sympathetic family loyal to Samur and her family, but the hearth of the Borijin clan would not be relit quickly. Esen still held power, but somehow his grandmother’s public defeat of him had turned the tide of an increasingly frustrated nation of followers, and they rose up in revolt in 1454.

In the ensuing battle, Esen’s enemies seized his family and herds while he fled virtually without supporters. Thousands of his followers hungered for revenge against him for killing some beloved member of the family. The opportunity for that retribution fell by chance to Bagho, a man whose father Esen had murdered.

Bagho caught up with the khan, killed him, and dragged his body up into a tree on Kugei Khan Mountain. Here he left it for the world to see. The hanging body replicated in grisly detail the origin myth of Esen’s Choros clan that states they descended from a mythical boy found dangling from the Mother Tree of life like a piece of fruit. The clear political statement for those left behind was that legitimate power of the office of Great Khan belonged exclusively to the Borijin clan.

The grandmother Samur and her grandson Esen died about the same time. She ended her days with this one small victory and with the faint possibility that it might grow into something much larger—that maybe her dreams of a united Mongolia under the Borijin clan could be fulfilled after her death. Like all of us at the final moment, Samur had no way to foretell if her life’s work would have a permanent effect or simply wash away in the tide of coming events.

8

Daughter of the Yellow Dragon

MANDUHAI WAS BORN IN 1448, THE STRONGEST AND most imperial of all the zodiac years, and the only one with a sign designated for a supernatural being: the Yellow Dragon. According to some records at the time of her birth, her parents lived well south of the Gobi, possibly near the oasis of Hami in modern Xinjiang; according to another tradition, she was born on the Tumed Plain in the vicinity of what later became the city of Hohhot, the capital of today’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. In either case, she grew up in relatively arid zones of what is now northern China, and this area and type of environment remained sentimentally important to her throughout her life.

By the mid-fifteenth century, the clan system created and imposed by Genghis Khan had totally deteriorated, but a new one had not yet emerged. The Mongols had returned to the political chaos that preceded their unification in 1206. Clusters of formerly unaffiliated families formed expedient amalgamations that sometimes took an ancient name or sometimes a new one. An individual’s tribal or lineage allegiance might change several times during a lifetime, and even if the group remained the same, the name could be altered.

Manduhai was a member of one such clan conglomerate, the Choros, which included members of the defunct Onggud and Kara Kitai as well as the still surviving Uighurs, Oirat, and Uriyanghai. The Choros clan had recently ascended to unprecedented power under the leadership of Esen, and Manduhai was born at the height of his power, just before he