Yesukai called his son, Temujin, to him. He sat in his yurt, with the Shaman at his side, and two old men. Temujin, impatient, stood before his father, while Yesukai surveyed him thoroughly from head to foot.
“Thou art old enough to be betrothed, my son,” he said at last. “I have it in my mind to take thee to the tents of the Olhonod, where they have fair maidens with good dowries. Make thyself ready. For, as thou dost know, thou wilt remain with the parents of thy betrothed. Thou mayest take with thee two friends who will remain with thee for a time, to comfort thee so that thou wilt not regret thy home.”
His lined brown face softened for a moment, as he gazed at his son. Surely no man had a more comely. But Temujin was scowling with dismay.
“Am I to go now, my father?”
“This hour. Make haste, Temujin. Our horses are already saddled.”
Temujin went to the yurt of his mother. Being a practical woman, she would hear no complaints from him. “Thou art old enough to be betrothed,” she said, repeating Yesukai. “But when thou art married, thou wilt return to the ordu of thy father, and when he hath died, thou wilt be the khan.”
She gave him a little silver box of perfumed ointment for his bride. She smiled at him, her gray eyes bright with indulgent affection. “Give me many grandsons, my child,” she said. She put her long palms against his cheeks in a swift embrace. It pleased her and aroused her pride that he was so tall and handsome. “No man liveth to himself alone. At the appointed hour he must take up the sword of duty. He who shirks must die. It hath always been so.”
Kurelen listened to Temujin’s angry plaint philosophically. The crippled man thrust his finger with a ribald gesture into the other’s breast. “What! Art thou not a man? If thou art not, return to thy father, and plead for more time.”
Temujin flushed with fury. He looked at Kurelen’s grinning face, and for the first time in his life he was seized with a desire to strike it. While he struggled with the impulse, Kurelen, still laughing, opened one of his chests and withdrew from it two wide bracelets of silver, cunningly cut. The silver seemed spun of cobwebs, so fine was it, so delicately fashioned. The design was of a climbing and flowering vine, and the petals were made of turquoises and dark red stones. Kurelen hung them lovingly on his fingers, and forgetting his brief rage, Temujin squatted on his haunches and admired the trinkets.
“Ah,” said Kurelen, softly, and dropped them off his fingers into Temujin’s eager hands. His eyes narrowed a little with regret, but he smiled. Then he put his hand into the chest again, and brought out a wide and heavy necklace to match. Temujin could not repress a cry of pleasure as the necklace tinkled and clashed over his fingers.
“May she be sufficiently fair to add luster to these baubles,” said Kurelen. “And may her virtue be as precious. It is said she who weareth these will never lack for sons.”
He added, while Temujin thrust the bracelets over his fingers to study the effect: “May thy wife love thee above all other things. Our people scorn the love of women as a worthless thing. We ask only they be pleasant in our beds and bear us many children. But that is because we are barbarians. Know that, in truth, Temujin, nothing is more precious than the love of the woman we desire, and that that love is water in a desert, a horse among enemies, a sword in battle, and a warm hearth. It is a fortress and a refuge. He who hath such a woman hath a jewel above all price, and all heaven with it.”
Temujin was surprised. He looked up, expecting to see a quizzical smile on his uncle’s face. But Kurelen’s expression was somber and weary.
“Hast thou ever loved, Kurelen?” he asked, astonished. He looked about him. Chassa sat near by, weaving hair into a rope. But she answered Temujin’s glance with a strange smile, and bent her head.
“Yes,” answered Kurelen, tranquilly. His face was as bland as new milk, and as without expression. “But, go thou: thy father is calling thee.”
When Temujin had gone, Kurelen sat in deep silence for a long time, his hands hanging limply between his knees. Finally he looked up, and caught Chassa regarding him with an aspect of sorrowful yearning. He reached out and took her hand, and as he did so, a scarlet flood ran over her face.
“I should have given thee to a virile man a long time ago, Chassa,” he said, gently.
She burst into tears. She laid her head on his knees. “Nay, master! Nay, master,” She kissed his feet in a frenzy of humble passion and grief.
He laid his hand gently on her head, and a look of wonder and gratitude brightened in his eyes. Love is not to be despised, he thought, almost with humility, even when it is made manifest in a poor creature like this, or even in a dog. It is wine of priceless vintage, and becometh no less intoxicating in an earthen cup than in a golden one.
Temujin chose Subodai and Chepe Noyon and Jamuga Sechen to accompany him and his father to the ordu of his betrothed. After their first dismay, the youths became hilarious and eager for adventure. Even Jamuga laughed more than usual. Temujin teased him because he was not betrothed, and Jamuga vowed that he would be married before him. But Subodai only smiled, and rode a little faster, his eyes fixed ahead.
They rode towards the sunset, their hoods pulled over their heads, for the air was rapidly cooling. They had long ago left the fertile meadows, and were now riding slowly over the broken floor of the desert, which was flooded with the blood-red light of the dying sun. Here were tossed huge boulders, black as ebony, crusted with prophyritic sparks. Two great smooth pillars of stone stood before them, like the ruined, gateways of a temple. In the distance reared shattered ramparts with ribbed and flattened tops and sides, black against the consuming heavens. The Mongols encountered no other living creatures in this awful universe of red fire and black boulders and sparkling crimson earth and frightful loneliness. Soon they were overcome with awe, their eyes glancing, appalled, at the limitless flaming sky and the limitless ruined earth, which were imbued with the supernatural light of hell, and the unshaking silence of death. Their horses felt their apprehension, and shied when their hooves struck with a ringing sound on some smaller rock, and shattered it into fragments. The whites of their eyes caught the red radiance, and blazed, rolling.
And then, as they rose upon a shallow terrace, an unearthly scene met their eyes at the left. A great misty lake, shadowy blue and violet, lay in a sunken valley, its vague shores strewn with dark purple pyramids of stone. There it floated, cool and lost, catching no red light from the red heavens, its outlines nebulous and pale, its waters as fixed as shadow-filled glass. There was something terrible in the aspect of this remote and motionless water, which had the appearance of a dream in the fiery twilight. Immobile yet drifting, it seemed almost at hand, and then again, a hundred leagues away, deepening and paling in its hues of dim turquoise and amethyst. Its margins mingled with and faded into the red desert, without vegetation.
Temujin uttered a stunned cry at the sight of this lake. Jamuga murmured. Subodai sat on his horse and gazed in silence. But Yesukai looked upon the water without perturbation.
“It cannot be!” exclaimed Temujin. He inhaled a deep breath, but the acrid and burning air was not filled with the fresh smell of water.
Yesukai nodded. “It is not, in truth,” he said. “It is but a desert mirage, a dream. But it doth appear at every sunset like this, in this very place, unchanging, and men call it the Lake of the Damned, for many have lost their lives seeking to approach it. When it is full day, and the sun is high in the sky, there is nothing there but a whitish plain, strewn with greenish stones. The old wise men say that once on a time, many ages ago, a lake did verily lie there, in a fertile land filled with the clamor of cities and the comings and goings of a vast populace. This is but the specter of that lake, an evil illusion, leading men to death.”
The youths fell into deeper silence as they gazed upon the lake, which moment by moment enhanced its aspect of an unearthly dream. A sensation of dim horror seized them. Temujin felt an irresistible urge to ride down to it. His whole soul was pervaded with that urge, which had in it a kind of terror. He looked at the low pyramids of purple stone scattered about the margins. One was the shape of a temple, and the broken pillars of it were vividly discernible. Temujin shook his head. His heart was beating violently, and in that deathlike silence he could hear the throbbing sound of it.
Suddenly the reserved Jamuga cried out in the loud and echoing voice of fear: “Let us go on!” And without waiting for a reply, he spurred his horse so fiercely that it reared back on its haunches, and then plunged ahead. Temujin began to laugh, as did Yesukai. They followed Jamuga. When they had gone a little distance, they missed Subodai. They saw him, a black silhouette against the red sky, watching the lake. He was like a statue carved of ebony, motionless on his horse. They shouted to him. It was not until they had shouted several times that he seemed to hear, and then he followed them in a tranquil canter. When he came up to them, they saw that his face had taken on itself something of the weird and dreamlike quality of the accursed lake.
The burning sky rapidly paled and faded, and almost in a twinkling the desert night had fallen. They camped as soon as the last rays had gone.
That night, as he lay wrapped in his furs and felts near the campfire, Temujin had a strange and preternatural dream. He dreamt that he and Jamuga were sitting on their horses near the margin of the Lake of the Damned. It had a terrible fascination for him; he could not take his eyes from it. He was conscious of a wild exultation in him, and he could feel the hot sweat pouring down his back and face. But when he looked at Jamuga, it was as though he looked at a dead and suffering face. Jamuga’s eyes were distended, and filled with an anguished light. He pointed at the lake. His lips moved, and though Temujin could hear no sound, he knew that Jamuga was warning him, solemnly and with agony.
And then as Temujin, bewildered, watched, Jamuga opened his coat and revealed his breast. There was a bleeding wound in it, ghastly to see, and in its spongy depths he could see Jamuga’s heart, beating and dying, spouting thick red fountains of blood.