Chains of Nobility: Brotherhood of the Mamluks (Book 1)

SECTION 1

CHAPTER

Ⅰ

Duyal

The upper Volga River country

July 9, 1236

Duyal swings his scythe with machine-like efficiency, each stroke adding a tidy clump of hay to his row. Blood oozes from the cracks in his fingers, adding a gloss to his weathered grip—crimson trickling down the maple shaft and into the splits, mixing with the black stains from his people’s earlier toils. When his hands begin to cramp, he halts. Shrugging to ease the tightness in his neck, he looks up to the cloudless sky and then forward to the waving grassland, where the wind ripples bristled spikelets as far as he can see across the vast steppe.

His life, their life, had always been about the grass. It fed their animals and the game they hunted. Its dried, melded strands in gathered cow dung fueled their fires, kept them warm. Its nutrients and moisture became the milk they drank, the meat they ate, and the wool and felt that kept out the winter wind. They moved always in search of the best of it, passing by the thin shanks growing in sandy soil, yet staying for moons in rich floodplains, where its sheaths grew stout. They were happiest when its blades were thick, green, and abundant, anxious when it was scarce or snow-covered; they thanked the Great Sky when the spirit doused it. It had always been this way for the Kipchaks.

A dozen men work nearby, engrossed in their rhythmic task. They advance as one, each whoosh from their sharp edges adding length to the parallel ribbons of scythed grass snaking across the rolling steppe. Those men not cutting hay work honing stones across their curved blades, from beard to toe, sweat from their chins helping to lubricate the metal.

Ten paces away, Duyal’s Uncle Besim rotates his body with straight arms, releasing his powerful stroke with no apparent effort, the toppled stalks falling cleanly behind his steel in wide swathes. The lanky man leans the tool against his ribs, raises his leather flask, draining the last swig.

Before he can set down the container, Duyal grabs the vessel and those belonging to the other men, placing their straps around his neck. His uncle smiles and winks as Duyal passes him. He runs to the stream and fills them. After he returns each, his uncle walks over on pigeon toes, gazing at their morning’s work.

You drink first, Besim says, stooping to grab a handful of grass and crushing it in his hand. The Saman spoke true. The Great Sky smiles upon us. By tonight, even this grass can be stacked. He smiles, jutting out his pointed chin. He chugs the water, pats his nephew on the back, and resumes his task.

As the sun shifts farther into the southern sky, there is nothing but the swish of blade, the grunt of men around him, and the fresh scent of hay. Sweat drenches his tunic. He concentrates on maximizing each swipe, making certain the entire blade is employed.

A scythe goes silent behind him. Another. He turns, follows his uncle’s eyes. Dust rises in the distant hills. Nearer now, a flash in the dirt screen around them. Another spark from a rider’s head. Helmet. A second one, then a dozen emerge from the dust, black figures in column.

His uncle’s tool strikes the earth with a thud. Three whistle blasts.

Women scream. A baby wails. Men run to their shelters, exiting with bows and quivers. Some wiggle into chain mail shirts on the run; others plunk the odd Rus helmet on their heads. Warriors sprint to the herd, jump on barebacked ponies, pulling fists of mane toward the enemy.

His uncle grabs him, pulls Duyal’s chin to face him. Grab Baris, scatter the flock into the woods, hide yourselves in the spot.

I will stay and fight alongside you.

He backhands Duyal across the face. Do as I say! The flock—they mustn’t get the animals.

Duyal pulls loose and rushes toward his younger brother, grass whipping against his trousers. Baris and the others are already yipping and waving their arms about the black-headed sheep. He finds the family’s most valuable possessions, slapping each ox hard on the ass, causing both to run in opposite directions.

How many riders? Baris asks.

Too many.

Duyal turns. The first of the Mongol warriors has already topped the hill. He runs, his feet pounding the uneven meadow, Baris beside him, pumping his arms wildly to keep his brother’s pace. Downhill to the rocky draw. Baris falls forward, skidding to a halt, the force of his body breaking the string of his bow.

Duyal pulls him up by the arm, turning frantically to see if they follow. Reaching the hiding place—a crevasse surrounded by three huge rocks—he pushes Baris in it.

He tries to slide in, but no longer fits. He sucks in, ramming his body sideways into the cranny, scraping flesh from his shoulder blades and sternum as he pops through. They collapse inside, panting like dogs. The distant beat of hooves, the howl of wounded men. Baris moves toward the opening.

Duyal pushes him back down. You won’t save them. Stay as we were told.

Baris covers his ears to block the bugling neigh from their ponies, the choppy orders blurted, and the screams from kin.

Then silence. They wait, pulling the clammy air into lungs with rapid breaths.

A woman’s whine. The clank of metal over the hill.

You stay, Duyal says, slamming his way back through the opening. He scampers up the hill.

He crests and stops. Four Kipchaks lie on the open steppe, arrows protruding from their bodies. A group of mounted invaders circles the tower’s sheep and goats. A Black Tartar chases Duyal's older cousin, bringing his pony alongside to hack him down in an almost lazy slash. Women huddle in small groups holding the youngest to their breasts. His uncle lies face down before them. Beside him, Duyal’s father, Gunes, tugs on an arrow buried in his shoulder.

Rage consumes him. Duyal charges down the hill. His father takes another arrow to his thigh, a third to his back. Embracing his fate, Gunes grins, snapping all but the arrow in his back. He draws, shoots at a Mongol moving across his front. The surprised Mongol falls from his horse.

Two more arrows plunge into his father’s chest, felling him. With eyes wide and his shoulder propped up by the broken arrow in his back, his father smiles up at the Great Sky.

Duyal screams. Nearly blind with tears, he charges a Mongol archer. Time and space and fear cease to exist. He will die with the others.

Something catches his left foot. He takes another stride and is instantly upended. The rope goes taut about his ankle. Mongol laughter fills his ears. From behind, Choo!

He is slammed to the ground, spun to his back. A single puff of cloud floats in the sky. He attempts to take a breath, yet is unable. A yank. Now skidding across the grass, he fights to keep his tunic from pulling up around his head. His arms become pinned. Hoof beats at the gallop. A dusty powder packs his nostrils, covers his tongue. The earth speeding beneath him strips the skin from his back and buttocks. A burn, then numbness.

He struggles to his butt, frees his arms, and grabs the rope with one hand to reduce the tension, fumbling with the slip at his ankle with the other. The stalks slap his face and arms, like a torrent of water rushing over him. He gasps for air. He wonders if he will drown in this raging river of grass. His ass pounds a hard lump, throwing him back. A hit to his ribs, another to his head . . .

He awakens, struggling to breathe in small bursts. The blur of two dark figures in leather chestplates, bickering over his body. He closes his eyes, feels a lump growing on the back of his head, blood seeping down his forehead. A surging pulse throbs through his temples. He tries to clear his head, slowly moving his left foot, realizing the rope around his ankle is loose.

You killed him. What will we tell them? a Mongol asks the other.

Duyal rolls to his feet and lunges for the closest one. The tall Mongol turns in his saddle, lifts a club and cracks Duyal with an offhand swipe across the skull.

Blackness.

CHAPTER

2

Duyal

The upper Volga River country

July 9, 1236

With his right eye socket swollen nearly shut, Duyal peers down with his good eye. A pair of wasps land on the animal skin before him, the crumpled hide turned inside out, exposing its slimy tissue. Treading on the white surface, the two insects push through clumps of flies, until finding a sliver of pink muscle. The wasps scissor pieces of flesh, wrap their legs about the morsels, and depart for the nest. Duyal wishes he could take flight with them.

A gray encompasses both sky and steppe. Nearly one hundred fly-speckled sheep hides lie scattered about Duyal and the other four boys. The tinny smell of blood on grass now owns what was their summer camp. A heap of skinned heads stare at him, their unblinking eyes holding a perpetual look of shock, disbelief that he did not do more to save them. Their pale tongues protrude through closed mouths, as if each sheep died disgusted with him.

Flies find their way through the rips in his tunic and trousers, biting at his oozing abrasions and the gash across his back. He occasionally pinches his shoulder blades and tenses his skin as would a cow, but he mostly lets them feed. An ache thumps inside his skull.

The Mongols had led his people’s ponies over the hill, while they took the boys and most of the sheep and goats down to the river. There they pulled stakes and leather straps from their saddlebags and secured the animals’ rear legs to make the skinning easier. Pulling daggers, they made their incisions behind the shoulder and reached bloody right arms into sheep after sheep, tearing vein from heart. Penned sheep downwind bawled, hearing the screams and smelling the fate of the others. With his own feet secured by the same stake and strap, for a time Duyal pondered if they would skin him and the other boys as well. They still may. He does not care.

Most of the butchered animals went on the backs of ponies, departing in every direction, while the remaining livestock was driven northeast.

Tonight we break loose. They don’t know our land like us, Duyal whispers to his brother, only half believing his own words.

It looks to be their land now, Baris says without looking back, his glazed eyes fixed on the fur-brimmed hats and slant eyes of those who set their bivouac.

No speak! the guard says in broken Turkish, looking up from his pony’s bit ring, which he attempts to bend back into form. He is the youngest among them and has grown his thin mustache long to make up for its lack of thickness.

Duyal looks away. He makes a fist to encourage circulation past his bound wrists. His foot goes numb. Despite the warm weather, he begins to shiver. His teeth clank together, as do those of his brother and another youth. Two more remain curled in the grass, lumps of worn flesh and tattered garments.

He runs his tongue across a split lip, letting the taste of iron linger. He grinds his teeth. His eyes swell, tearful. The animals’ cries and moans will always ring in his ears. He is a coward. This is how he repaid his family, his elders, at their time of need. His mother—he hid while they slew his sweet mother. Tears soak the collar of his tunic.

The sun dips. He rolls the day’s events over in his head. He had followed his uncle’s instructions, yet the twisted hides and curled wool adorning the bank serve as reminders of his ineptness. He was given but a boy’s task and could not even properly execute that duty. He prays for the Great Sky to take his miserable life. As he does, the wind changes, blowing the scent of cooked mutton across his nose. The smell turns his stomach. He stops his prayer short. He won’t insult the spirits of his parents and uncle by making any wish related to himself.

He tells himself he must remain aware, ready if a chance presents itself. He counts the number of short-legged men stuffing meat in their faces—thirteen, their saddles staged in neat rows beneath the aspen. Two men wander about their pony herd, guarding nearly forty animals.

An iron-helmeted trooper approaches the five youths, cupping his wooden bowl with short fingers, his round face bronzed by the sun, his eyebrows so long they nearly trap his lashes when blinking. His dark mustache beads sheep juice, looking like a mink just leaving the river. Clad in long jacket and black-scaled armor, he shakes his head and raises the fur on his lip, as if he had just drunk from a cup of rotten milk. Why do they spare these scamps? he asks, turning to an older man who now joins him.

Young and sweet like Russian honey, more dear than Chinese silk, the old man chuckles, slurping a piece of stray flesh into his mouth. He waves his greasy mutton leg at the prisoners to confirm his words and saunters back to his fire, looking over his shoulder to growl his commands. Get the girls some fleece. Feed them—or it will be our asses, he says.

Two deep-chested troopers snap to their feet and approach on stiff, bowed legs. One tosses hunks of half-cooked shank meat to the boys, as one would to dogs. The other dumps a heap of fleece at their feet. They walk away.

Their hands, the old man says with one open palm.

The troopers turn on their heels. They kick awake the sleeping boys. Untying the hemp from the boys’ wrists, they bring the captives’ hands in front and rebind them. Duyal winces as his arms are brought forward. He considers flinging his bound wrists over the man’s neck and choking him, but such an attempt would be futile.

A second warrior joins the young guard, laying his bow across his knees, leaning back against a scrawny pine. He pulls a file from his leather sack and begins working an iron head drawn from his quiver. The warrior looks up. Duyal looks down, before their eyes meet.

Duyal eyes the camp, taking in their weapons. Axes, clubs, leather-handled swords. He makes out the c-shaped form of composite bows lying across their saddles, cased in waxed skins. An arm’s reach away from each man, a second bow, strung and ready. A mass of buzzard-feather fletching extends from quiver openings. Arrows encircle a rock, straight willow rods stacked neatly to dry, the grass concealing the likely assortment of deadly blades. A dread fills him.

Don’t even think of it, the young warrior says with a scowl, seeing Duyal’s eyes upon the projectiles. Just eat, so you don’t die.

Duyal leans forward to spit at him, but again he thinks better, swallowing the thick saliva he prepared for launch. Squinting in the low light, he memorizes where each bow rests. His brother tips over and immediately begins to snore.

When dusk creeps upon them, the soldiers return to secure the boys’ arms behind their backs for the evening. One man weaves another long rope around the neck of each boy and leaves the running end in the hand of the watchman. The lads remain seated, facing the invaders with indifference. Before them sits the untouched meat, the last of the flies finishing their dance upon its withered surface.

Squinty-eyed men ladle fermented mare’s milk, koumis, from his people’s gut bags into wooden cups. Their smiles break only long enough to allow a gulp of the spirit and then return again, even broader.

He bites his cracked lips. This morning, things were as they had always been. Just over the hill, thirty-eight ponies belonging to his tribe, or what the Kipchaks called a tower, munched on half-brown grass, gracefully hopping on hobbled legs. Underneath nine of the sixteen mares, young foals suckled.

Koumis hung from the support beams of every shelter, as they had entered the season when milk was becoming plentiful, when the colts were nearly old enough to nourish themselves by grazing, when pairs of women milked the mares day and night, using a foal to start the flow of milk and then reaching around both sides of the mare’s rear leg with bucket on knee to milk her properly. And by candlelight in the gers, the felt-covered lodgings of the Kipchaks, young children learned their numbers by counting each stroke, as they churned the fermenting liquid.

Their sheep had been healthy, and all was set for a fine breeding season this fall. They had already begun the late summer regimen, drinking mare’s milk and eating yogurt curds to spare their sheep and goats for the leaner months ahead. But their livestock is no more. Their lives are no more.

The pine snaps and sizzles in their fires. The black-clad men squat about the flames, some still cutting flesh from the spitted animals with long knives. The koumis works upon them. Their tallest man laughs hard and often, the kind of merriment seeded from a satisfying day’s work. One releases a long, deep belch, sounding in tone much like that produced by his drunken father.

Outside the ger, the scuff of boot heel on dirt, and then a stumble. Duyal roused from his sleep inside. His father’s belch, followed by his cursing at the entrance flap.

His older brother, Gozde, clicked his tongue and scampered on all fours to the wall opposite the entry flap. He burrowed his head beneath the felt of their shelter.

Duyal followed, pushing his brother’s butt through, waiting with the heavy material upon his back until Baris also vacated their expedient escape hole.

Then iron fingers latched to his ankle. A shot of adrenaline ran through him. The grip tightened, like an owl’s talons upon the neck of a hare. He rammed his knee forward. It went nowhere. The leg then jerked backward. His brothers gripped each of his arms, yanking in the opposite direction, their butts skidding on the dew-covered grass, reversing any gain.

Duyal looked up to their faces, his eyes white in the night. No, run . . . you run, he said calmly, knowing it was no use. His father would only get to beat one of them this time.

His siblings persisted, but the second hand found him, wadding the back of his tunic into a fist. Back into the family dwelling he went, sprawled and scratching the turf in defiance, the felt up around his neck.

Run, hide, he whispered to his brothers, the sound of tearing grass in hand spelling his fate.

The hollow sound of ponies ripping grass is muffled by the lapping of river over stone. The crickets begin their melody. His eyelids grow heavy, becoming lost in the nearest blaze. He is beyond tired but cannot sleep. The wind picks up, pushing the hissing licks of flame sideways, flapping them like a child’s blanket.

Their smoke drifts into the boys’ faces, causing the youths to bow in reverence and suck in their captors’ fumes. Flecks of gray ash fuse to raw skin, leaving them speckled ghosts of their extinct towers.

With head down and fingers locked, he thinks back to his mother’s ger and the voice of an elder, barely heard over the crack of fire and felt-muted patter of the rainfall. The oft-recited verbal history whistled through the gaps in the old man’s teeth.

It was five generations ago, when Duyal’s line of Kipchaks moved down from the northern country in search of a kinder climate, better hunting, and improved grazing lands for growing flocks. Legend had it that for weeks many towers traveled south and west, through the country of both ally and enemy, eventually reaching the lush grasslands between the Volga and Ural Rivers. There, the Kipchaks met fierce resistance from the nomadic Oguz—herders, hunters, not so different from Duyal’s own people. Every Oguz band united, fighting to protect their lands.

Yet they were no match for multitudes of Kipchaks and their accurate arrow fire. In only days, the Oguz were driven out. Over the decades, the Kipchaks pushed farther toward the setting sun, dominating all the steppe between the Black and Caspian Seas, settling on the drainages of four major river systems: the Dnieper, Don, Volga, and Ural. The lineage of many ponies in the Kipchak towers could still be traced back to stock taken as plunder from the war with the Oguz. Dances and chants, festivals and tales were created as tribute to his brave predecessors.

He had always been thankful for his ancestors, those Kipchaks with the resilience to endure the trek from the Tobol River and the courage to push the enemy from this land. Yet he had never given much thought to the Oguz. Still bleeding and staked like a pony, he thinks of them now. A dark smile fractures the mask of crusted blood upon his face.

They change guards. Their flames fall off to breathing mounds of coals, like the gills of newly spawned beasts living beneath the soil. Beasts. In these fires, whatever child was left within him burns to ashes; whatever man he was meant to be drifts away in their smoke. The raiders disperse into the murk with leather bags over shoulder to occupy the gullies, pulling skins over their hardened bodies, seeming to slink back into the crevasses of hell from which they must have come.

Duyal rolls his shoulders, a vain attempt to loosen the knot about his neck. He lies on his side, fights the fleece over him. Staring into the darkness, he shivers.

CHAPTER

3

Duyal

The upper Volga River country

July 10, 1236

Duyal awakens. Moving his arm, he expects the soft felt wall of his ger against his elbow, but it is not there. He reaches to wipe his face, yet is halted by the cut of hemp on wrist. The past day’s events slowly sink into his mind, like a pebble tumbling to the bottom of a deep pool. The sting returns to his heart. No. He must still be dreaming. He must have dreamt it all.

He digs a thumbnail into the back of his hand, breaking skin, but he does not wake among his family as hoped. He attempts to sit up, but is stopped short by stabs of pain in his ribs and legs. Struggling, he finally rocks himself to a rest on sore buttocks, a setting crescent moon throwing faint shadows about his wretched form. The Mongol watchman turns, letting Duyal know that he is alert.

His head pounds, the pressure feeling as if it will crack his skull. He feels his gut push upward and leans to puke, wiping the lingering string of mucous upon his shoulder. The last coils of smoke from their embers seep into his lungs, stinging his nose and throat. He shrugs to lose the sheepskin from his shoulders, yet the fleece sticks to his back, a layer of dried pus and blood bonding tunic to fleece. A forced swallow and blow of thick snot to the ground.

In time, he raises his eyes to the dawn. A violet hue cast wide across the rolling sea of grass. Swollen clouds float across the fading specks in the night sky. What was only a gurgle in the vast darkness transforms into the meandering ribbon below, a steady purr of current. River scrub awakens with the chatter of sparrows and chickadees. His brother still sleeps, blotched with mud and covered in hair-like cinders from their fires. A breeze goes through him, a shudder.

The first rays of sun break the horizon gloriously, the beams pushing the invaders from their hasty bivouacs, like a stick jammed into an ant mound. They go from sleep to action instantly, stowing skin covers under leather flaps and saddling ponies, while chewing on dried meat and yogurt curds. Men head riverside with their comrades’ leather flasks slung over shoulders, the hollow knocks of hard leather marking their steps.

Their leader calls them in with only a raise of his hand. Speaking over a model of the terrain, he points with riding stick at the boot heel-constructed valleys and mountains, occasionally turning to indicate the actual territory before them.

Duyal nods off. He dreams of wild dogs feeding on his tower’s lambs, of him and Baris carving through the drooping plumes of grass atop their ponies, methodically shooting the livestock killers. On the run, the pack’s alpha male looks up at him with yellow eyes, exposing a soaking bib of red about his neck and chest.

He stirs, the hoof strikes in dream stomping him into consciousness. A band of ponies, more than twenty, Duyal guesses, thunder into camp, dripping water beneath curved bellies, their thick legs plastered in mud, their shoeless hooves clacking over river rock and hammering the turf in resounding thumps. Bays and grays and chestnuts, some spotted white. All are twelve to fourteen hands tall; some with untrimmed manes in black and white, splayed in wild elegance, engulfing their rippled necks. Several nicker as they near, toting with them the smell of damp leather and churned river bottom. Others stomp their hooves, jerk their heads, upset to be halted.

Most of their riders are cloaked in padded long coats, wrapped at the waist by silk sashes in blues and reds. Their trousers are wool; their thick-soled boots crafted from cow leather. A few wear armor, covering their chest with hardened scales like fish skin, but void of protection upon their backs. Some sport helmets of iron, or hardened leather. Others are in strange felt hats with two or three flaps tied up to the crown of their heads, like ger entrances. One bears a wound on his head, a bandage wrapped diagonally above his ears. Another wears a tunic stained red-brown, a soiled cloth snugged around his forearm.

Half the riders dismount and hobble their ponies, all the while hurling smiling barbs in foreign tongue at their mates. These are received with insults, soft chuckles, and smirking nods from the others.

Yet those pulled behind the riders on bareback do not laugh. Nine more Kipchak boys, secured by horsehair rope to the invaders’ mounts. These captives, red- and blond-haired adolescents, are unbound, free of marks and injury. One coughs nearly continuously. Their ponies bunch, and the boys whisper among themselves, eventually looking in the direction of Duyal and the other youths.

Duyal glares at them, and then at the man at the front of the formation. He must be their khan.

This man leaps from his mount with the spryness of an eight-year-old. His braided hair, long and shiny-black, dangles about his shoulders. His nose spreads flat across his face. His eyes are no more than slits, and these dart around camp, taking stock of the situation. Swaggering on short legs to the restrained youth, he looks over each from head to toe.

For a while, he paces behind the boys, swinging a wooden riding stick from a leather strap around his wrist. With great speed he alternates between single and double rotations, each time catching the gnarled oak in his palm with a slap. He talks to himself, agreeing with only some of his own counsel.

The khan calls over last night’s leader and another warrior. They confer, occasionally looking and pointing to various Kipchak boys. The mounted warriors wait in silence upon saddles laden with maces and battle-axes, their blades and pikes pounded into deathly shapes unfamiliar. From wooden frames hang quivers and cased bows and the same leather bags. Their ponies rip at tall grass and sample branch tips from riverside alders. Several men lean far to one side, leaving only one thigh on saddle, providing relief to worn asses.

The three break from their meeting, nodding in agreement. Their khan crosses his arms and strokes his thin beard, while the other two shout orders to the troops. The men pull six of the new boys off their ponies, as if they were baggage, leading the Kipchaks to Duyal and the others. They then untie the older boy behind him, along with Baris. Two warriors push the coughing boy upon another pony and lead him over the hill.

A man motions for Baris to mount a pony among the warriors. Baris hesitates. The brute reaches for his club. Baris jumps on.

Can my brother and I stay together—he’s right there, Baris says, pointing at Duyal.

Shut up, the warrior says without looking back.

He’s able, a hard worker. Please, Baris says.

The warrior turns, placing a hand to his club, but then eases it back to his side after catching a scowl from his superior. Baris looks to his brother with wide eyes, mouth ajar.

Several warriors run to the shade tree, where piles of wrapped meat sit. They snatch several, tying the bundles to their saddles, while others fill water flasks. The Mongols then depart with their boys packed into the center of the column. Baris turns back to his brother, hopeless tears streaming down his face.

Duyal fails to fight back his own tears. Through blurry eyes, he watches his brother’s outline on a thick-legged gray fade into the dusty eastern horizon.

The five newcomers exchange glances, eyebrows drawing tight when their eyes pass over their new companions. The clean Kipchak faces go long, as the Mongols bind them to the human chain.

Why? We will not run, a boy says.

A strong-necked Mongol finishes his knot. He slowly turns his head to check his commander’s location and then throws a quick elbow across the Kipchak’s face.

Duyal bites his lip. He wishes to strangle them. If these boys had not arrived, maybe Baris would have been allowed to stay. In one day he has lost everything. He wrestles the woolskin with chin and shoulder, pressing his head in the dirty fleece to muffle his sobs.

He hates himself, weeping, as would a young girl. He is a disgrace to his bloodline. He reconstructs his father’s and uncle’s final moments. Can he not muster even a fraction of their courage? How could he think he was on the verge of manhood? He will give the Mongols a reason to slay him. If the spirits wish to punish him for his weakness, this is fine. But they can choose only the form of punishment; Duyal surmises that he has a say in its duration. He wipes his eyes, turns to watch the pair of warriors trot back over the hill, trailing the coughing boy’s empty-saddled pony behind them.

CHAPTER

4

Duyal

The upper Volga River country

July 12, 1236

Schwack! The bite from the Mongol’s riding stick sends a jolt of adrenalin pumping through Duyal’s limbs. The surge lifts his head, compressing the sunburned skin on the back of his neck. His eyes pop open.

A multitude of silvery plumes ripple in the sun, blinding him. He turns away, squints to ease his eyes’ adjustment. The tanned hills of the steppe stretch before him, blunt-topped ridges and curvaceous fingers interrupted only by cut ravines and clusters of pine and scrub bunched in the depth of its drainages.

No sleep, the Mongol behind him growls.

Duyal corrects his seat on the bare back of the pony, sliding easily on the grunge, which coats his backside to the knees. The pale slime has formed each afternoon, the rubbing between his and the pony’s flesh tearing at the sores on his buttocks and thighs, until his blood is churned frothy with the pony’s sweat. The Mongol in front of him turns, peering over Duyal’s head to shoot a warning glare at the assailant.

They have assigned a warrior to each lad, this guard responsible for every aspect of their boy’s upkeep. When his youth eats, pisses, or shits, the Mongol sponsor is obliged to supervise. At night, Duyal cannot roll over in sleep without the joined leather straps awakening his personal escort. Under bow point last evening, he was made to strip and wash, his sentry’s motivation less about concern for the boy’s health or comfort, more about his commodity surviving the trip south.

No Mongol has bothered to ask the name of his boy, probably for the same reason that Kipchak boys do not trouble themselves in naming their sheep. Instead, the Black Tartars identify each of the eight boys by distinguishing marks or behaviors. Those names that seem to have stuck: the tall one, one with splinted arm, stupid boy, tiny, one who won’t shit, wild-faced boy, orange-hair, and for Duyal, puffy-eyes.

They ride, the adolescents led by rope procession, the Mongols looking like a string of protective fathers pulling in tow their family of oversized tots, or perhaps a gaggle of captured wives. Those Mongols unburdened by a youth work the front, rear, and flank security, all riding with bows strung across their thighs, quivers flopped open.

The man to his front is Duyal’s Mongol. While no taller than the youth, beneath his lamellar armor is a chest as broad as a barrel; on each shoulder are straps of muscle the size of goat legs. Under his thick boot leather flex calves chunky from life in the saddle. His cheekbones sit high and plump, covered in dark skin, which turns into premature wrinkles near his goateed chin. His face tapers to lips thin with no expression. He rarely shows his teeth, yet when he does, they gleam sharp and yellow. While this duty seems beneath him, his eyes alone give indication that he takes this and probably every assignment seriously.

For three days they have stuck to the west bank of the endless Volga, pushing downstream, some of the boys astride ponies that once belonged to their tower’s warriors. The Mongols ride hard, starting just before sunrise and stopping at dusk.

The sun beats upon the column. Sweat pours into Duyal’s eyes. He can do nothing but blink the sting from them. Those Mongols with helmets have stowed them, preferring their brimless felt hats, made by their women from four identical section sewn together to form a point at the top. Some now fold the sides down to protect their ears and necks, while the Kipchaks endure with bare heads, their hats long since taken or lost.

The khan points his finger. They push their horses uphill. His keepers are not foolish. They trod the upland country, far above the dense groves of aspen and colonies of bush willows, which thrive in the river bottom. They continue, staying higher than the abundant feather grasses, which dominate the hillsides, not wishing to risk their precious cargo in flopping tussocks, tall enough to swallow both horse and rider.

They drop back down with hardly a word passed between them, only the clank of tack and thuds of hoof on dry grass telling their presence. They move through spindling stalks of labiate, the last of their purple-eared flowers peeking among the stipa grass at the riders like curious mice. Through a meadow, they part striking cornflowers with mops of floppy yellow hair and white-headed umbellifers, looking, as Duyal’s mother often said, like Kipchak gers must when viewed far above by the Great Sky.

Rounding a bend, they clomp over circular patches of dark soil, where over one hundred gers once stood. Turf-pocked shadows, gloomy silhouettes mocking towers once large and strong. They weave around old Mongol fires, charred stubs of ger frames and goat bone relics edging the charcoaled beds. More livestock bones gleam where the slaughtering took place, tossed by the new lords of this land, each limb stripped successively cleaner by Mongol, then wolf, then ant. Above them, rain-pitted mounds of dirt dot the hillside, the graves of kin being the wives’, sisters’, and mothers’ last chore, before the women were led away.

Each day they have passed such places, those upriver only recently devastated or abandoned, while most of those farther downstream laid to waste moons ago, the dung from their departed herds bleached white and hard, shoots of new grass pushing up where nomads once slept.

They continue for most of the day, eventually topping a hill. In the valley bottom, a tower seems to hum with surprising normalcy, women going about their chores, unaffected by the occasional Mongol patrol, which ride up and down both sides of the river. Duyal figures there is only one way these Kipchaks were spared, their khan having taken the often unpopular path of submitting to Mongol rule. He is beginning to wish his small tower had done the same.

They drop down, the Mongols keeping their distance from the tower. A woman mending trousers looks up from her work. Seeing the roped boys, she shakes her head and spits on the ground. Her face returns to the gray mass on her lap.

Two lads, toting reed baskets on their backs, collect dried dung with pronged sticks. One of them, upon seeing the white skin of the riders, releases his load and walks toward the column. Able to see the Kipchak faces, he halts atop a small knob. He squats, sitting upon his heels, his arms wrapped about his knees. Seeming to recognize none, he drops to his ass, his eyes now riveted to the grass at his feet.

Two whistle blasts pierce the air. An old man tending a tiny herd watches the boy. He makes no sign, leaning on his staff. The boy turns to him, takes to his feet, and returns the basket to his back.

The column moves away from the water for some time, eventually cutting across an oxbow in the river’s course. The familiar stench of death fills a depression in the terrain. Duyal buries his nose in his tunic.

Movement above grabs his attention. A slim woman drags a twisted corpse uphill, using its bare foot as her handle. Lowering her butt, she lurches the body upward, the stiff man’s bent elbow collecting grass at its bend like a human hoe.

The file of riders startles her. She pauses, her gaunt chest heaving, her deep breaths sucking in the fabric tied neatly across her face. The cloth conceals her attributes, disclosing only dark bags below empty, green eyes. She brings the neck of her dress up to wipe the sweat from her forehead.

Seeming to know better, she averts her gaze, looking over her shoulder to the location of three more warriors in the grass, dead Kipchaks fixed at strange angles, a Rus shovel leaning against the contorted leg of one. Lean limbs protrude from bloated torsos; strong arms that once drew bows to provide and protect have now gone rigid and decayed. She continues to pull on the man, up and up, to a height where the spirits may aid his transition. Rotting men, going underground without weapons or