We stagger through the empty streets, two young men with gargantuan heads on spindle-limbs. The few Jurchens we encounter scurry by with a hunted look in their eyes. We go to the east of the city, to a crumbling stone stairwell in the rear of a weed-choked temple garden. We go up to the stone battlements of the city wall and peer out. I am stunned when I see the enemy camp. Thousands of ox-skin yurts and cattle-dung fires and helmeted Mongol warriors on armoured horses, as far as the eye can see. The Mongols have devoted a city to their siegecraft. You are enraged. Your eyes narrow to vengeful slits beneath your gnarled and tangled hair.
‘Barbarians!’ you spit. ‘One day I’ll rip off their heads and piss down their throats. I’ll fuck their mothers and daughters to a bloody squealing pulp. .’
Way down below, a devil’s horseman trots towards us on his mare. His skin looks as though it has been flayed off, lime-cured in a tannery then sewn back on as human leather. His nose is flattened between his cheekbones and his yellow eyes glare up from beneath his helmet. Hearts hammering and legs shaking, we crouch down. ‘Has he seen us?’ I whisper.
An arrow soars whistling over our heads in answer to my question. We flee down the stone stairs back into the accursed city of Zhongdu.
That night you go out cat-hunting. When you get back we cook and feast on your kill. After supper we laze on the floor and I watch you in the flickering firelight. I watch you pick fibrous strands of cat-meat out of your teeth. Sprawled by the fire, your eyes are lazy and slitted as a tiger basking in the sun. I reach and stroke the iron-scorched markings on your cheeks. The scar tissue is hard and shiny under my touch. ‘Who branded you?’ I ask. You do not open your eyes. ‘Where do you come from?’ I ask. ‘Who are your people?’ Your robe is open and I move my hand over your famished chest. Your rib bones and tautening nipples. The jut of shadows in your skeletal frame. My stomach tightens. Now or never, I think, and move my mouth to yours. A jerk of your chin warns me this is not what you want. Your hand pushes on the back of my head, pushing down. Down past your sternum, down past your sunken stomach, to the rags about your groin. I loosen the rags and bury my face in the thatch of hair and what lies beneath. I take you in my mouth and feel you come to life. Swelling, growing engorged inside me, against my tongue. The smell of you, unwashed for months, is musty and intoxicating. I glance up. Your eyes are still closed. I move over you, my rhythm quickening until you spurt your bitter seed. Swallowing, I pull my wet and glistening mouth away. Sprawled on your back, your eyes are shut, and you look peaceful, as though having a pleasant dream. As much of a stranger as you were before.
The Fall
The hooves wake me at dawn. The stampeding hooves of tens of thousands of Mongols galloping into Zhongdu on horseback. I shake you awake: ‘Tiger! Tiger! Listen!’ You sit up and listen to the kettledrums out in the streets. The yodellings of war cries and the bloodcurdling screams of Jurchens dragged from their homes.
‘Hide, we must hide!’
Shaking, we hurry up on to the roof. I am shuddering hard, pale with fright. ‘O Lord Buddha, have mercy on our souls,’ I plead, over and over, though the mantra brings no peace of mind. You are silent, keeping your wits about you as you watch the Mongols rampaging through Zhongdu. Narrowing your eyes and thinking of how to save our skins.
The Mongols are orderly and systematic. They plunder our city, ward by ward, street by street, house by house. From the roof, we watch them haul a wealthy merchant’s family out of hiding in the next alley, thrusting spears to their throats and commanding them to bring out their valuables. The family obey. They scurry back and forth, fetching porcelain vases, wooden puppets, silk gowns, paintings, ostrich-feather fans and other family heirlooms. They plead for mercy as they lay the offerings at the Mongols’ feet. But our conquerors have no mercy. They rape the screaming wife and daughters, penetrating and ejaculating in a few thrusts. Then they execute. For many moons the Jurchens have been wasting away slowly from starvation. But now death strikes the city like lightning as throats are slashed and hearts impaled by arrows at close range. The Mongols then set the houses of the slaughtered Jurchens ablaze; smoke darkening the sky as Zhongdu goes up in flames.
The devil’s horsemen gallop into our alley and we flatten ourselves against the roof as screams rise up from below. You curse as an axe smashes through the bolted door of Glassblower Hua’s workshop, and I shake and beg the Lord Buddha for mercy. I shut my eyes, awaiting death by suffocating smoke (should fate be lenient), or by burning (should fate be cruel). You shake my shoulder.
‘Look, Turnip, look. They are letting the craftsmen live!’
In the alley the Mongols are rounding up the craftsmen of Zhongdu: stonemasons and carpenters and glassblowers and metalworkers, a group of miserable old men with black and swollen eyes being trussed up with ropes.
‘We must surrender,’ you say. ‘Stay up here and we will burn.’
‘Tiger, no! They will kill us!’
‘Stay then. Burn in the flames.’
Though I am terrified, I go where you go. So, on shaking legs, I follow you down. In the alley you crash to your knees before a Mongol with flaring nostrils and yellow skin.
‘I am Glassblower Hua and this is Carpenter Lu! We offer our skills as craftsmen to our conquerors and rulers, the Mongols!’
A traitorous Jurchen in Mongol robes translates our surrender into Mongolian, as you kowtow, knocking your forehead to the ground. The Mongols seize us. They smite us with their fists, but they do not kill us. They bind our wrists with rope and march us and the other craftsmen down the central avenue of Zhongdu. Massacred victims of the fall are everywhere. Corpses young and old, flung in the dust. And stunned and bereaved and frightened as we are, we know that we are better off than them.
The Mongol Juggernaut
The wagers of war ride on horseback and the slave-drivers lash their whips, driving us Jurchens forth like herds of cattle, away from Zhongdu. Oxen drag the yurts where the high-ranking Mongols reside on wheeled platforms. Sixteen war-horses pull Genghis Khan in his magnificent palace yurt, surrounded by a battalion of ten thousand warriors, defending the ‘Lord of Mankind’.
The Mongols want to civilize their barbarous lands and have herded up Jurchens with knowledge and skills: bone-setters and physicians; artisans and engineers. They have gathered labourers too: young boys to tend to the animals and put up the Mongols’ yurts; young girls to milk the cows, gather dung for fires, cook meals and serve the Mongols’ voracious physical needs. After months of starvation, many Jurchens fall in the dust, too weak to march. The Mongols whip them and, when they don’t stand and walk, slash their throats. Throughout the day we stagger on and the Mongol juggernaut sheds corpses like a balding man sheds hairs.
At night we slaves sleep on the bare earth under the sky. When light rains fall we shiver and curve our spines against the drizzle, hugging ourselves in the cold. When there are thunderstorms and heavy rain beats the earth beneath us to mud, we abandon hope of sleep. Lightning illuminates our writhing sea of slaves, mud-drenched and with chattering teeth.
At daybreak the Mongols lash their whips and we drag our weary bones from the earth. Slave girls ladle rice gruel into our bare hands, and a leather flask of water is passed amongst the herd. The Mongols lash their whips once more and our dark swarm of humanity moves on, the sun beating down and dragging our shadows out from under our feet.
The Mongol caravan journeys north by hoof and wheel and blistered foot, kicking up a storm of dust. I walk by your side, stride for limping stride. The nearness of you, the rhythm of your breath, and your stoic, determined face is a comfort to me.