The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Having arranged this confrontation, Ibari and his men rushed forward and incited the crowd against Ulus Bolod. Another man jumped out from the crowd to offer his own horse to Ulus Bolod, on which he could flee, but the conspirators already had their troops ready and they barred any escape. Ulus Bolod and the few men with him dashed into the holy tent itself for refuge, where the priests tried to protect them, but the hostile troops began shooting their arrows. In the ensuing battle at the shrine, it is said that Ulus Bolod managed to kill one of the enemy, and one of Ulus Bolod’s men wounded Ibari, but the small group could not outfight the larger force attacking them. The new jinong Ulus Bolod was killed after only one day in office.

Dayan Khan vowed revenge for the assassination of his and Manduhai’s son, calling on the Eternal Blue Sky and the spirit of Genghis Khan to help him. “May you heaven, and next, you Holy Lord know the blood which has been shed and abandoned, and the bones which lie drying.”

Dayan Khan dutifully called his army and prepared to lead them south to reinstate control over the southern tribes, chase out Ibari, and install another son as jinong. He would henceforth rule from his base located in the central part of the Mongol territories south of the Gobi, in what is today Inner Mongolia, as head of the Chakhar clan of Mongols. His sons would occupy the lands to his left and right.

Now past sixty, Manduhai lacked the stamina to ride a horse across the Gobi one more time and charge back into battle. She had been at war for more than thirty-five years. Manduhai and Dayan Khan had scarcely been apart in those years. Ever since they came together, they had shared one life between them. Now the time had come for Dayan Khan to go on without her. He was in his early forties and had many years left ahead of him to rule, but she would not be there to see it. It seemed as though there would never be an end to the violence, that as soon as one rebel or warlord was struck down, another rose to replace him. The long struggle of Manduhai to unify her nation seemed to have been in vain.

Manduhai would never again see Dayan Khan—the crippled boy whom she had dressed in large boots and stood before the Shrine of the First Queen to make him khan, the boy whom she put in a basket and took to war, and the man whom she married and with whom she raised eight children. As Dayan Khan and his sons rode south from Manduhai’s ger, it had been almost exactly three hundred years since Alaqai Beki had stood before her mother, Borte, and presented her cheek to be sniffed before riding south to assume her rule over the Onggud. From the same area near the Kherlen River, Manduhai sent her sons and husband back to complete the work that she had pursued throughout her life.

Whether Manduhai sniffed her sons on both cheeks or not we cannot now know, but maybe she casually demurred the offer of the second cheek. “I will sniff the other one when you come back.” Of course, she would not cry. As Dayan Khan and her sons rode south toward the sun, she would pick up her pail and toss milk into the air with her tsatsal. They would not look back at their wife and mother, and she would stand there throwing the milk until they passed over the horizon. As long as she was able in the closing years of her life, she would arise in the mornings and repeat the ceremony of aspersing milk for her absent husband and children. Maybe she occasionally rode off into the deserted steppe to share her pain with Mother Earth.

Manduhai remained behind to die, but the nation she had resurrected did not die. She had saved the Mongols and created a government that would protect them for generations. Her Jade Realm now stretched from the Siberian tundra and Lake Baikal in the north, across the Gobi, to the edge of the Yellow River and south of it into the Ordos.

The lands extended from the forests of Manchuria in the east, beyond the Altai Mountains, and out onto the steppes of Central Asia.