I gathered that she was making fun of the newest wife her husband had acquired. (There was no limit to the number of women a Mongol man could wed, so long as he could afford to set up each one in a separate yurtu.) The woman acidly remarked that he had been dead drunk when he asked for the hand of this latest one. All the men chuckled, the husband included. And they all snickered and giggled as she listed the new wife’s shortcomings, evidently in ribald terms. And they absolutely guffawed and fell about on the carpet when she concluded by suggesting that the new wife probably urinated standing up, like a man.
That was not the most comical thing I had ever heard, but it was certain evidence that the Mongol women enjoy a freedom denied to almost all other females in the East. Except in comeliness, they are more like Venetian women: full of liveliness and good cheer, because they know they are the equals and comrades of their men, only having different functions and responsibilities in life.
The Mongol males do not simply sit idle while their women drudge, or at least do not all the time. After our meal, my hosts walked with me about the bok, showing me the work of men variously occupied at fletching, armoring, currying, cutling and other military crafts. The fletchers, having already laid up a good store of ordinary arrows, were that day forging special arrowheads pierced with holes in a way that, they told me, would make the arrows whistle and shriek in their flight, thereby putting fear in the heart of an enemy. Some of the armorers were thunderously hammering sheets of red-hot iron into the form of breastplates for men and horses, and others were more quietly doing the same with cuirbouilli, heavy leather boiled to softness, then shaped and let dry, when it gets almost as hard as iron. The curriers were making wide waist belts ornamented with colored stones—not to be worn for mere decoration, they told me, but to protect the wearers against thunder and lightning. The cutlers were making wicked shimshirs and daggers, and putting new edges onto old blades, and fitting helves to battle axes, and one of them was forging a lance that had a curious hook projecting from the blade—to yank an enemy from his saddle, the maker told me.
“A fallen foe can be more neatly skewered,” added one of my guides. “The earth makes a firmer stop than the air, to pin him against.”
“However, we disdain too easy a stroke,” said another. “When the foe is unhorsed, we ride back a way from where he lies, and wait for him to cry defiance—or mercy.”
“Yes, and then plunge the lance point through his open mouth,” said another. “That is a fine feat of aim when done at the gallop.”
Those remarks put my hosts in a mood of happy reminiscence, and they went on to recount for me various stories of their people’s wars and campaigns and battles. None of those engagements seemed ever to have ended in a defeat for the Mongols, but always a victory and a conquest and a profitable pillage afterward. Of the many tales they told, I recall two with special clarity, for in them the Mongols contended, not just with other men, but with fire and ice.
They told how, once upon a time, during their siege of some city in India, the cowardly but cunning Hindu defenders had tried to rout them by sending against them a cavalry troop of unusual composition. The horses bore riders made of hammered copper in the shape of men, and each of those charging riders was in reality a mobile furnace, the copper shell being filled with burning coals and flaming oil-soaked cotton. Whether the Hindus intended to spread conflagration among the Mongol Horde, or merely consternation, never was known. For the furnace-warriors so singed their own mounts that the horses sensibly bucked them off, and the Mongols rode unimpeded into the city, and slaughtered all its less-incandescent defenders, and made the city their own.
Again, the Mongols waged a campaign against a savage tribe of Samoyeds in the cold far north. Before the battle began, the men of that tribe ran to a nearby river and plunged into it, and then, on emerging, rolled in the dust of the riverbank. They let that coating freeze upon their bodies, then repeated the process several more times, until they were armored all over with thick mud-ice, and judged themselves safe against the Mongols’ arrows and blades. Perhaps they were, but the frozen armor made the Samoyeds so thick and clumsy that they could neither fight nor dodge, and the Mongols simply trampled them under the hoofs of their steeds.
So fire and ice had unsuccessfully been used against them, but the Mongols themselves had occasionally used water, and successfully. In the Kazhak country, for example, the Mongols once besieged a city called Kzyl-Orda, and it long held out against them. The word Kazhak means “man without a master,” and the Kazhak warriors, whom we in the West call Cossacks, are very nearly as formidable as the Mongols. But the besiegers did not simply sit encircling the city and waiting for it to surrender. They made use of their wait by digging a new channel for the nearby Syr-Daria River. They diverted its course and let it flood Kzyl-Orda and drown every person in it.
“Flooding is a good way of taking a city,” said one of the men. “Better than pitching in big boulders or fire arrows. Another good way is the catapulting into it of diseased dead bodies. Kills all the defenders, you see, but leaves the buildings intact for new occupants. The only bad thing about those methods is that they cheat our leaders of their favorite enjoyment—making their celebration banquet on human tables.”
“Human tables?” I said, thinking I must have misheard. “Uu?”
They laughed as they explained. The tables were heavy planks supported on the bent backs of kneeling men, the vanquished officers of whatever army they defeated. And they laughed right heartily as they imitated the moans and sobs of those hungry men bowed under the weight of planks laden with high-heaped trenchers of meat and brimming jugs of kumis. And they positively guffawed as they imitated the even more piteous cries of those table-men when the feasting was done, when the Mongol celebrants vaulted onto the tables to do their furious, stamping, leaping victory dances.
In telling their war stories, the men mentioned various leaders under whom they had served, and the leaders all seemed to have had a confusing variety of titles and ranks. But I gradually divined that a Mongol army is really not a shapeless horde, but a model of organization. Of every ten warriors, the strongest and fiercest and most war-experienced is made captain. Similarly, of every ten captains, one is chief, thereby having command of a hundred men. And the ordering continues to progress by tens. Of every ten chief-captains, one is flag-captain, with fully a thousand men rallying to his pennant. Then, of every ten flag-captains, one is the sardar, having command of ten thousand men. The word for “ten thousand” is toman, and that word also means “yak’s tail,” so the sardar’s standard is a plume of yak tail on a pole instead of a flag.
It is a superbly efficient system of command, since any officer at any level from captain up to sardar need confer with only nine other equals when making his plans and decisions and dispositions. There is only one rank higher than sardar. That is orlok, meaning roughly a commander-in-chief, who has under him at least ten sardars and their tomans, making a tuk of a hundred thousand warriors, sometimes more. His power is so awesome that the rank of orlok is seldom given to any man but an actual ruling Ilkhan of the Chinghiz family line. The army then camped in bok about Kashgar was a part of the forces commanded by the Orlok-and-Ilkhan Kaidu.
Any Mongol officer, besides being a good leader in combat, must at other times be what Moses was to the Israelites on the move. Whether he is the captain of ten men or the sardar of ten thousand, he is responsible for the movement and the provisioning of them and their wives and their women and their children and many other camp followers—such as the aged veterans who have no usefulness whatever, but who have the right to refuse retirement into garrison inactivity. The officer is also responsible for the herds of livestock that go afield with his troops: the horses for riding, the beasts for butchering, the yaks or asses or mules or camels for pack carrying. To count just the horses, every Mongol man travels with a string of war steeds and kumis-milk mares that number, on the average, eighteen all together.