Deep in the barrens, in the wastes and steppes of the Gobi, Temujin sleeplessly busied himself with his consolidation of the little peoples and tribes whom he had absorbed. It was nothing to him that the mighty Karait and the Tatars laughed at him, and forgot him. “Let them laugh, and forget,” he said, when it was reported to him by his spies. “Laughter and forgetfulness are mine allies. But some day they will not laugh, and never again will they forget.”
In the meantime, more and more traders paid him tribute to protect their caravans. The Chinese paid him huge sums and gave him vast treasures for this protection. “At last,” many of them said, “we have some semblance of order in the heart of the horrible Gobi. This man hath made men of ravaging beasts, and it is nothing to us how he hath accomplished this. He hath created order out of a jungle.” And now their historians deigned to give him a line or two in their recordings.
But for the most part, the mighty and the rich, the secure and the fortressed, had never heard of him. Behind the great wall of Cathay, built less to keep out barbarian invaders than to keep the flower of civilization within, the enormous empire went about its business and knew nothing of a young Mongol khan and his petty confederacy in the lost barrens of a desert of which they had only vaguely heard, and shuddered delicately upon hearing.
Temujin, indeed, was only a little savage chieftain lost in the wastes, busy about his own tiny affairs, his antlike manipulations. The Chinese were more aware of the mighty Tatars, beating like sullen but still inoffensive waves against the Great Wall. “Their women give birth to litters,” complained a Cathayan noble. “Some day we shall have to reckon with sheer weight of numbers.”
But the others laughed. “The barbarians are armed only with bows. They are only lumbering bears, these Tatars. In the meantime, our horsemen ride the tops of our walls, and our gates are guarded by the best soldiers in the world.”
So civilization slept and dreamed, and the Tatars muttered and quarrelled near the walls, or rode out in vast armies to plunder the surrounding country. And occasionally, their elegant and civilized masters, the Chinese, had to send, with immense boredom, some expeditions against these barbarians, merely to call attention to their own might, and the inadequacy of the Tatars, much in the fashion of a father languidly disciplining one of his many and annoying sons.
But the Tatars received these expeditions with less and less respect, and even showed much fight and resistance. And finally, the Chinese, annoyed and detesting, decided something must be done once and for all, against them, in order to teach these stinking barbarians their proper place in the scheme of things.
History, who had yawned for a thousand years in Asia, stirred on her dust-covered couch, and opened her eyes. And when she opened them, an ominous sound struck upon her ears—the long subterranean mutter of barbarians at the gate of civilization. She sighed, sat up, shook the dust from the pages of brittle manuscript, and reread the ancient story. And then she took up her pen and moistened it, and waited. “It is an old tale,” she said, and her old bones moved wearily, for she had thought to sleep forever.
“What shall be the name of the monster in this hour?” she thought. “From whence will he rise again? From the east, from the west, from the north, from the south? A thousand times he hath risen and conquered, and at the end is conquered. But always he doth come, and always the old tale is rewritten.”
She yawned wearily, and wondered whether the day would ever come when the monster would be forever destroyed, and she could sink into eternal sleep.
Among those who did not laugh at Temujin, the little forager of the barrens and the steppes, was Toghrul Khan, who had his own spies.
“Men make a great error when they hear a man boasting, and say that because he boasteth he will never act,” he said, to his son, Taliph. “That is a vicious aphorism. Men who act first talk. I fear talkers.”
“But do not think so much of this Temujin,” said Taliph. “I confess I used to think of him. But now he hath sunk back into his proper perspective—an ambitious little ant-king surrounded by thousands of empty miles. Let him have his small day among the other ants. Think, this day, of the Tatars.”
But some strange obstinacy made the old khan think of Temujin.
“History is always contemporary,” he observed.
Taliph was impatient. “If that is so, then it hath begun to sing of the Tatars.”
But still Toghrul Khan thought of Temujin, and he could not shake it off. “I should have killed him when I had the opportunity,” he said. “Who knoweth? Maybe men might have been grateful for this killing.”
Taliph thought his father in his dotage. It seemed folly to him to waste a thought on such an insignificant insect as Temujin, who was certainly no menace to the great Karait peoples. One single army of the Karait could destroy him overnight, and leave no trace even upon the Gobi. Indeed, his father was in his dotage. But he had not been quite the same since the death of Azara, that idiot girl who had nestled so deeply into her father’s heart. For months the old man had cried without ceasing: “Why did she do this thing? Was I a harsh father? Did I strike her down and despise her? Nay, I loved her. She was my heart’s darling. She was the spark of mine old eyes. I had given her as bride to a great prince of her mother’s people, and she would have been a queen. Why did she do this thing, my child, my lovely one?”
Taliph thought this incessant mourning indecent, for Azara had only been a woman, after all. It was obscene for a man to lament like this for cheap girl-flesh, however beautiful. It was comtemptible even to seek for a reason for this suicide. Any clever man knew that women were unpredictable cattle, and only fools tried to fathom the reasons for their blind follies.
Taliph was glad, however, that his father had begun to speak of something else besides Azara. The endless chant had disgusted him. So he talked of the Tatars, who were a real menace, by reason of their very numbers, to the peace of the cities.
“They need discipline again,” he said.
But Toghrul Khan spoke only of Temujin. “I should have killed him,” he repeated.
“Thou wasteth too much time in thinking of one of the least of thy vassals, my father.”
Toghrul Khan gazed deeply before him with sunken and feverish eyes.
“He is a shadow of fire on the black dawn of the future,” he murmured. “I dreamed last night that he rode out of that black dawn, and he and his horse reached from the earth to the sky. I could not remember his name, and some one whispered to me that he was immortal, and had had many names, and would have many more.”
But Taliph was wrong in assuming that his father was in his dotage. Never had the old man been so aware of events. He listened closely to the reports of his legions of spies, who were everywhere in Asia. And that strange prescience of his made him listen even more attentively to the reports of Temujin. He even knew that Temujin had another son now, and would soon have another. Three sons, then. “The litter of the Beast,” he said aloud, and was terrified at the involuntary words.
He knew the names of Temujin’s chief noyon, his half-brother, Belgutei; his brother, Kasar, and Subodai, Chepe Noyon, and Jamuga Sechen. They were not the names of ants to him, despite the occasional arguments of his reason. They were names of visitations.
And then one day he had a summons from a great Chinese general to appear at the latter’s court within the Wall.