The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [95]
After the prince hurriedly refreshed himself, he headed back out into the desert. The young girl found several young men and told them about the wealthily clad young man, and five of them saddled their horses and raced off after the unusual visitor.
Although the prince and his horse had water, the horse was slow and worn. The men easily overtook him. When they reached him, one shouted at him, “What sort of man are you?”
“A traveler,” the prince responded, trying not to reveal his identity to them.
“Give us your belt,” the attackers demanded.
The prince refused. The belt was an emblem of manhood, and being of gold made it both a precious object but also a higher symbol of his royal rank. To rob a man of his clothes, particularly his belt, constituted one of the gravest insults, as well as a financial loss. The very word “beltless” stood as a synonym for “woman.” It was almost all that the prince had left in this world.
One of the men grabbed the bridle of the prince’s beloved horse while the others pulled him from the saddle and killed him.
Because a man’s deel is next to his skin, it absorbs not only his sweat and odor but a part of his soul and his fate. No matter how beautiful and costly his deel, the assailants dared not put it on and possibly assume the fate of this Golden Prince. Instead, they seized his gold belt, took his beautiful chestnut horse, and left him.
Many dreams ended there in the Year of the Tiger. The beautiful prince, whose mother hid his genitals to save his life, who crouched in an iron pot under a mound of dung, who was tossed in the air at the tip of a bow and rescued by a man racing on horseback, who grew up in obscure poverty but briefly reigned beside a khan who dressed him with gold and silk and told him that he could conquer the world, was dead at age nineteen. Bayan Mongke Bolkhu Jinong, the Eternally Rich Rising Golden Prince of the Mongols, lay stretched out on the Gobi rocks, beltless and lifeless in a silk deel embroidered with threads of gold and lined with squirrel fur.
No one mourned him, and as his body rotted in the desert, the survivors of his drama had to go on living. With all the important actors now dead, the twenty-three-year-old Manduhai stood alone on an empty stage. Her fate seemed hardly more auspicious than that of the dead prince. Her first husband was dead and so was his heir. The widowed queen was only a junior wife from a distant place. She had been given in marriage by her family, but now the clan to which she had been given was empty. Everyone was gone.
Death had taken away every role Manduhai knew; life had taken away her fate. The dead khan left no male heir to marry her. Manduhai was still queen of the Mongols with every right to continue ruling, but for the first time since Genghis Khan created the nation, it appeared that he had no descendant to be khan.
Life had not prepared Manduhai for this moment. She did not yet know of what she might be capable. She had no man to fight for her, no woman to advise her. The road before her had no destination and no markers. There were no myths or stories to instruct her, no sayings to guide her. Even if the young queen had learned to read, she had no scripture to inspire her and no priest to counsel her.
There was no time to learn. An unprotected widowed queen was the target for any ambitious man who wanted to become khan. With the khan and crown prince both dead and no other heir around, marrying the dead khan’s wife was the only legitimate path to power. She was the target and trophy for any ambitious man on the steppe. It was a unique moment when the office of khan was completely open to whoever could claim and occupy it. Whatever warlord or general powerful enough to seize the queen would prove that he had the blessing of the Eternal Blue Sky to become khan.
It was better for her to choose among the contenders