It was at this moment that the soul, the shimnus, of the rabbit abandoned its dying body and entered into Elbeg Khan. The shimnus could not bear to leave the sight of its old body, and thus, through the eyes of its new body in Elbeg Khan, it stared back at its former self, the dead rabbit.
Finally, the shimnus-possessed Elbeg Khan spoke to his hunting companion in a pleading voice. “If only there were a woman this beautiful—with a face as white as snow and cheeks as red as blood.”
Rather than helping the Great Khan escape from the trance, his hunting companion, Dayuu, who was also being pulled inextricably into the horror about to unfold, encouraged the delusional desire. “But there is, my khan, such a woman,” responded Dayuu, but then he seemed to taunt the mesmerized khan. “But you may not see her,” he added.
“Who is she?” demanded the anxious and bewildered khan.
“She is the wife of your son,” answered Dayuu. “She is splendid like this,” he said pointing to the exquisite color on the white snow.
A strict taboo forbade a man from entering the ger belonging to the wife of either his son or his younger brothers, all of whom were collectively referred to as sons. While younger men had friendly access to senior women married into the family and might themselves one day marry one of them, a senior man had almost no interaction with the wives of his junior relatives and certainly could never marry one. Even to bring milk or food to her ger, he had to stand outside and pass it to her through an opening in the ger wall without seeing her or entering the dwelling.
Upon hearing that the beauty of his son’s wife was as great as the rabbit blood on the white snow, Elbeg Khan felt an irresistible urge to see her with his own eyes despite the law against doing so. His trancelike daydream suddenly acquired a focus and a goal that took his sight and attention away from the dead rabbit.
Genghis Khan once said that “when a khan behaves like a commoner, he will destroy his Mongol subjects.” Elbeg Khan was about to commit a crime that would nearly destroy the precious little that remained of the dwindling Mongol nation. The diabolical tangle of transgressions began as Elbeg Khan returned from hunting to his main camp determined to see this young woman.
“Show me what I have not yet seen,” he ordered his assistant, showing that he clearly understood the forbidden nature of his request. “You who bring together what is distant; you who satisfy my desires, my Dayuu, go!”
Dayuu slyly watched and waited for the appropriate opportunity to arrange a tryst between the khan and his daughter-in-law. After seeing the khan’s son leave to go hunting, Dayuu cautiously approached the beautiful young wife. “The khan commands you to let him come and visit you to see how beautiful you are,” he informed her.
Fully understanding the meaning of the proposal and its impropriety, she adamantly refused. “Are the heavens and earth no longer separate and it has now become acceptable for a great khan to see his daughter-in-law?” she demanded of the messenger. “Or has my husband now died?” she asked, “and the khan comes to tell me of it?” Suspecting an even deeper supernatural change, she perceptively asked, “Or has the khan turned into a black dog?”
The messenger returned to Elbeg Khan with the harsh words of rejection from his son’s wife. In his wrathful envy of his own son and in his fixation on seeing the woman with a face as beautiful as blood on fresh snow, Elbeg Khan mounted his horse and went out hunting his son. His sexual obsession had grown so strong that nothing could prevent his fulfilling that desire. The khan found his son and killed him.
Elbeg Khan rode back to the camp to rape his dead son’s widow. Rather than satisfying the khan’s desire, however, the attack only increased it. As his obsession with the young woman grew, he made her his wife. When she became the new khatun, Elbeg Khan made Dayuu the taishi, an office generally equivalent to prime minister and the highest position allowed to any man outside the Borijin Clan.
The curse of the rabbit spirit now began to spread, like a vicious plague of the soul. The beautiful young woman, the innocent victim who had lost her husband and was forced into a new marriage, became infected herself with the same wicked obsession of red on white, but in her the spell found a different focus. She needed to see her new husband’s red blood on the white skin of the friend who helped him to kill her first husband and violate her. Just as the khan lusted after sex, she lusted for revenge, and she would use sex to avenge herself on both of them.
The unwilling queen watched and waited around her new imperial ger in the royal camp. Her opportunity for revenge came when, once again, the Great Khan left to hunt with his falcon. Dayuu arrived at the royal tent. Because the Great Khan was not there, he waited outside the door.
The aggrieved queen saw the man and sent a servant out to him. “Why wait out on the cold steppe?” asked the servant, “when you can come into the royal home where it is warm?”
Dayuu accepted the invitation and approached the royal ger of the newly installed young queen. When he entered, she greeted him not with anger but welcomed him into the tent with exaggerated honor and lavish hospitality. She served him a platter of prized foods, including butter dainties and dried dairy dishes. She also offered him a drink of twice-distilled mare’s milk, the potent “black drink” of the steppe tribes. As the minister quickly showed signs of inebriation, she told him, with deceptive humility and feigned appreciation, what a great debt she owed him “for making my poor person important, for making my insignificant person great, for making me a queen.”
In appreciation, she said that she wished to give him her personal silver bowl. According to steppe etiquette, he had to drink the contents of the offered bowl to show his acceptance of the gift. But when he did so, he immediately fell unconscious.
The queen moved quickly toward her prey. She dragged his drugged, limp body onto her bed. She then tore out clumps of her own hair, ripped her clothes, and clawed herself all over her body. She tore at the fabric lining the walls, and then she began to scream for help. Servants and guards came running to her aid, and she showed them the wounds of red blood on her white flesh that, she said, came from fighting off a sexual attack from Dayuu, her husband’s friend and councillor.
The queen sent out her servant again, this time to find her husband, the khan, and summon him home to deal with the crime against her and against his honor and the prestige of the family. When the khan returned, she emotionally explained that she had summoned his councillor to thank him for making it possible for her to marry the khan. Then, when she gave him her bowl in gratitude and he drank its contents, “he wanted to become intimate with me,” she explained. “When I refused, he attacked me.”
Slowly regaining consciousness, the councillor heard the voices around him repeating the accusations against him. He panicked, and his fear gave him a new burst of energy with which he managed to jump up and flee from the tent. He grabbed the reins of the first horse he found, jumped on it, and raced away from the royal camp.
With the assumption that the flight proved his friend’s guilt, the khan called his men together, and they set out in pursuit. Just as he had hunted down the white rabbit, the khan now hunted down the friend who had helped him. When the khan caught up with the councillor, a fierce fight ensued between the two men. As the khan approached, Dayuu fired an arrow and struck Elbeg Khan in the hand, slicing off his little finger.
In retaliation, the khan shot his former friend and let him lie moaning in agony before finally killing him. Now the enraged khan skinned the body of his friend precisely as he had skinned the rabbit. The khan brought the flesh from the dead man’s backside to his young queen as a gift of revenge against her accused attacker.