The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (21 page)

The exodus from China was significant, but many of the refugee soldiers streaming into Mongolia were not even Mongol. They belonged to the European Ossetian and Turkic Kipchak soldiers originally brought as imperial guards for Khubilai Khan, who had feared his own Mongol warriors as well as the Chinese.

The Mongol herders, following their traditional way of life on the
steppe, did not welcome these strange Mongols gladly. During their seven generations away from home, the royal family had not become Chinese; however, they no longer lived as Mongols. They had all the confidence and bravado of the original Mongols of Genghis Khan, but they had none of the skills, strengths, or stamina. They seemed to have abandoned the virtue of Mongol life and ignored the virtue of Chinese civilization, preferring instead to combine the worst of both. The only occupation they had learned was ruling, and after the death of Genghis Khan, they had not done that well. Once back in Mongolia, they found themselves marooned in a vast sea of grass with little knowledge of their own nomadic culture.

The returning refugees hardly recognized their fellow Mongols who had remained north of the Gobi and continued to follow the traditionally rugged and independent life of nomadic herders. Throughout the sojourn of the royal family and their retinue in China from 1211 until 1368, these Mongols never completely submitted to the rule of their Mongol relatives from the Chinese capital. These Mongol traditionalists remained loyal to the spirit of Genghis Khan by following leaders such as Arik Boke, Qaidu Khan, and Khutulun, but they rejected, or at least remained suspicious of, the Yuan Dynasty established by Khubilai Khan and operated to the exclusive benefit of his descendants for nearly a century.

The Mongols who had dismounted in China and lived there for more than a century had lost their ability to survive in the harsh conditions of Mongolia. For them, hunting was an elaborately ritualized sport, not a survival skill; it was best done with transport elephants, dancing girls for the long evenings, trained warriors to pursue the animals, beaters to drive the animals to where the royals waited with their bowmen at their side, and a cadre of chefs to concoct exotic delicacies from the game.

They did not know how to stalk a wild animal, much less skin the animals or tan the hides. They did not know how to shear the sheep or make clothes from the wool, because they had grown accustomed to wearing silk woven by anonymous workers in the far corners of their
erstwhile empire. Each Mongol aristocrat in China had his own private herd, but they were for show and glory, like the ten thousand white horses of the Great Khan. Their century and a half in China had not acculturated them to any new skills; it had merely deprived them of their old ones from lack of use.

The returned Mongols and their foreign guard began eating up everything they could find without regard to season or weather. They slaughtered the animals indiscriminately, and they grazed them without concern for the survival of the pasture for another year. They chopped down the forests and fouled the landscape. They still had their passionate love of horses and tried to maintain their large herds even if sheep, goats, cows, and yaks proved more efficient at converting grass into meat.

Within only a few years, the returning Mongols ate up their homeland, destroyed the pasture, and burned the wood. To survive, they had to move ever farther north into the Siberian forests, west on the mountains and plains around the Altai, or back toward the south, to China from whence they came. The north was colder, harsher, and held fewer resources. The west was still inhabited by the steppe tribes that had not settled in China, and they maintained all the vigor and hostility of the old Mongols.

Though the Ming had chased them from the capital city, the Mongols did not consider themselves to have been overthrown. They had merely lost some territory. The newly emerging Ming Dynasty now controlled the agricultural parts of China, essentially the areas occupied by the dominant Han ethnic group. In victory they changed the name of the Mongol capital to Peiping, meaning “the North Is Pacified,” but many areas still lay beyond their reach. The Ming forces did not take Sichuan until 1371 and Yunnan until 1382. Other areas such as Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, eastern Turkestan, and Tibet remained permanently beyond the effective control of the Ming, leaving them with a far smaller China than the Mongols had held. Backed by the loyalty of many of these other areas, the Mongols still considered themselves to be the legitimate, though temporarily
exiled, rulers of all China. They controlled vast but empty territories, with few subjects, no cities, and only minor trade routes connecting China with the forest tribes of Siberia.

Even when the Ming soldiers hunted down the Mongol khans and killed the last ruling descendant of Khubilai Khan in 1388, the Mongols found other members of the Borijin clan to claim the office. Because of the continuing respect for the memory of Arik Boke Khan as the defender of Mongol values against the Chinese administration of his brother Khubilai, some of Arik Boke’s descendants now came to the fore to claim the office. In thirteenth century, Arik Boke had wanted to keep the imperial capital in Mongolia, and now his distant heirs resurrected that possibility. They no longer had the option of locating their capital in another country, since they had lost all the territory that Genghis Khan’s army had conquered, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. Now 150 years after the founding of the nation in 1206, they found themselves right back on the high, dry, cold Mongolian Plateau where Genghis Khan had started, and they were about to lose that. More precisely, they were about to lose their power over their ancestral territory and to become prisoners in their own homeland.

The Mongol Empire ended abruptly on a snowy day in 1399 when the sex-crazed spirit of a rabbit jumped on Elbeg Khan and captured his soul. Some observers may point to a more gradual decline of the empire from other causes, such as the outbreak of plague earlier in the century or the triumph of the Ming rebels in 1368, but the Buddhist chroniclers clearly saw the role of the rabbit as an intimate but secret protector of Genghis Khan’s clan.

The rise of the Borijin family stemmed from another snowy day two centuries earlier, around the year 1159, the Year of the Earth Rabbit. Genghis Khan’s father was out hunting a rabbit, and the rabbit lured the hunter on a path past a patch of freshly deposited urine. The yellow splash pattern of the urine in the fresh snow indicated that it had
been made by a woman. The hunter decided to let the rabbit survive and turned instead to hunt the woman; he found her, kidnapped her, and with her produced Genghis Khan and the Mongol royal family.

Normally the rabbit stood as a symbol of cowardice within the animal kingdom since it is so easily frightened, but having had its life spared, the rabbit became a secret guardian of the family through its rise to power. Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire in the Fire Rabbit Year of 1206, and in the animal cycle of years, the rabbit returned every twelve years. Each time it brought some special encounter with the Mongol khans.

Hunting always carried a close association with marriage and sexuality, and generally only men hunted. A boy’s first kill symbolized his marriage to a daughter of the forest, and to mark this loss of virginity, older men smeared fat from the animal onto the boy’s flesh. Genghis Khan personally performed the ceremony on his grandsons Khubilai and Mongke after their first kill in 1224 near the Ili River on the frontier between the Naiman and the Uighur territory. The boys were eleven and nine years old, respectively, and had killed a rabbit and an antelope. In keeping with the theme of hunting as marriage, men had to refrain from sexual relations with their wives prior to embarking on a hunt.

Somewhere along the way, the Borijin clan forgot about its relationship with the rabbit and the debt owed to the animal as the source of the family’s power. When the Yellow (Earth) Rabbit Year returned in 1399, the Mongol ruler, Elbeg Khan, again met the rabbit at the edge of the forest, but this time the encounter produced a much more gruesome result. Elbeg Khan had had no luck that day and was anxious not to return to camp without some game. Although the white rabbit was in the white snow, Elbeg Khan saw it. He carefully pulled an arrow from his quiver, fixed it in his bow, aimed, and shot the rabbit.

As Elbeg Khan approached the rabbit, he could see it dying atop the freshly fallen snow. A single arrow had pierced its body, but with an ever-weakening pulse, its heart squirted a spray of blood that collected in small red pools in the snow. The sight of the red blood on the white snow created a hypnotic effect over the Great Khan. He seemingly
entered into a trance and stared transfixed at the peaceful face of the rabbit and at the marked contrast of the two colors of red blood on white show—each so beautiful and yet so dramatically different.

It was at this moment that the soul, the
shimnus
, of the rabbit abandoned its dying body and entered into Elbeg Khan. The
shimnus
could not bear to leave the sight of its old body, and thus, through the eyes of its new body in Elbeg Khan, it stared back at its former self, the dead rabbit.

Finally, the
shimnus
-possessed Elbeg Khan spoke to his hunting companion in a pleading voice. “If only there were a woman this beautiful—with a face as white as snow and cheeks as red as blood.”

Rather than helping the Great Khan escape from the trance, his hunting companion, Dayuu, who was also being pulled inextricably into the horror about to unfold, encouraged the delusional desire. “But there is, my khan, such a woman,” responded Dayuu, but then he seemed to taunt the mesmerized khan. “But you may not see her,” he added.

“Who is she?” demanded the anxious and bewildered khan.

“She is the wife of your son,” answered Dayuu. “She is splendid like this,” he said pointing to the exquisite color on the white snow.

A strict taboo forbade a man from entering the
ger
belonging to the wife of either his son or his younger brothers, all of whom were collectively referred to as sons. While younger men had friendly access to senior women married into the family and might themselves one day marry one of them, a senior man had almost no interaction with the wives of his junior relatives and certainly could never marry one. Even to bring milk or food to her
ger
, he had to stand outside and pass it to her through an opening in the
ger
wall without seeing her or entering the dwelling.

Upon hearing that the beauty of his son’s wife was as great as the rabbit blood on the white snow, Elbeg Khan felt an irresistible urge to see her with his own eyes despite the law against doing so. His trancelike daydream suddenly acquired a focus and a goal that took his sight and attention away from the dead rabbit.

Genghis Khan once said that “when a khan behaves like a commoner,
he will destroy his Mongol subjects.” Elbeg Khan was about to commit a crime that would nearly destroy the precious little that remained of the dwindling Mongol nation. The diabolical tangle of transgressions began as Elbeg Khan returned from hunting to his main camp determined to see this young woman.

“Show me what I have not yet seen,” he ordered his assistant, showing that he clearly understood the forbidden nature of his request. “You who bring together what is distant; you who satisfy my desires, my Dayuu, go!”

Dayuu slyly watched and waited for the appropriate opportunity to arrange a tryst between the khan and his daughter-in-law. After seeing the khan’s son leave to go hunting, Dayuu cautiously approached the beautiful young wife. “The khan commands you to let him come and visit you to see how beautiful you are,” he informed her.

Fully understanding the meaning of the proposal and its impropriety, she adamantly refused. “Are the heavens and earth no longer separate and it has now become acceptable for a great khan to see his daughter-in-law?” she demanded of the messenger. “Or has my husband now died?” she asked, “and the khan comes to tell me of it?” Suspecting an even deeper supernatural change, she perceptively asked, “Or has the khan turned into a black dog?”

The messenger returned to Elbeg Khan with the harsh words of rejection from his son’s wife. In his wrathful envy of his own son and in his fixation on seeing the woman with a face as beautiful as blood on fresh snow, Elbeg Khan mounted his horse and went out hunting his son. His sexual obsession had grown so strong that nothing could prevent his fulfilling that desire. The khan found his son and killed him.

Elbeg Khan rode back to the camp to rape his dead son’s widow. Rather than satisfying the khan’s desire, however, the attack only increased it. As his obsession with the young woman grew, he made her his wife. When she became the new
khatun
, Elbeg Khan made Dayuu the
taishi
, an office generally equivalent to prime minister and the highest position allowed to any man outside the Borijin Clan.

The curse of the rabbit spirit now began to spread, like a vicious plague of the soul. The beautiful young woman, the innocent victim who had lost her husband and was forced into a new marriage, became infected herself with the same wicked obsession of red on white, but in her the spell found a different focus. She needed to see her new husband’s red blood on the white skin of the friend who helped him to kill her first husband and violate her. Just as the khan lusted after sex, she lusted for revenge, and she would use sex to avenge herself on both of them.

The unwilling queen watched and waited around her new imperial
ger
in the royal camp. Her opportunity for revenge came when, once again, the Great Khan left to hunt with his falcon. Dayuu arrived at the royal tent. Because the Great Khan was not there, he waited outside the door.

The aggrieved queen saw the man and sent a servant out to him. “Why wait out on the cold steppe?” asked the servant, “when you can come into the royal home where it is warm?”

Dayuu accepted the invitation and approached the royal
ger
of the newly installed young queen. When he entered, she greeted him not with anger but welcomed him into the tent with exaggerated honor and lavish hospitality. She served him a platter of prized foods, including butter dainties and dried dairy dishes. She also offered him a drink of twice-distilled mare’s milk, the potent “black drink” of the steppe tribes. As the minister quickly showed signs of inebriation, she told him, with deceptive humility and feigned appreciation, what a great debt she owed him “for making my poor person important, for making my insignificant person great, for making me a queen.”