Chapter 1
Cuauhnahuac
71st Year of the Khanate
(Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1440)
Cuauhnahuac is a beautiful place. The climate is temperate, none of the searing heat of the central desert, the bitter cold of far north, the humidity of the coastal areas or the damp fetid smells of the city. The air is fresh, lightly tinged with the delicate but changing scent of many flowers and warm during the day and cool and silken at night. The view is of green hillsides dotted with colors and mottled with light and shadows during the day and shining ethereally in the muted light of the moon or barely visible in the dim light of the endless stars on moonless nights. Yes, I picked the perfect place to end my days.
And yet, in all this perfection, I am, for the first time in my life truly alone. Of course, I’ve been by myself many times, but I was always on a mission or a journey to or from somewhere and consumed by that purpose. Now, while I am not exactly by myself, for there are servants and family about, I am alone. I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I suppose this is the inevitable fate of anyone who lives long enough, achieves an exalted position, and has the grace to step down before he becomes senile, but that is small comfort. There is the occasional visitor, but I have outlived almost all of my contemporaries, and the few remaining are too decrepit to travel all the way down here. My grandson drops by when he comes here to get away from the capital much like I used to do, and he’s gracious enough to ask my advice as though he really needed it. Very rarely I see my other children and grandchildren, and they always bring their children with them. Last spring, my youngest son, John, came back from the north with a new wife and to everyone’s surprise because of her age, she delivered a healthy baby boy in the winter.
He then told me that he had decided to name the child Karl after me. I warned him about the consequences, but he insisted it was time for another Karl. So I started thinking about the past and the many events that brought me to this place at this time. I reread all the books in my library in their many strange languages, including the now-fragile book in this ancient language. Finally it came to me—I can have one more mission in my life! I can set down my story for my family in this ancient tongue so no strangers can read it. It will enable me to relive my life, and I needn’t worry about anyone taking offense, to my family’s detriment. And who knows, perhaps one of my descendants will be moved to carry the tale forward, for I know there is still much adventure ahead in this wonderful new world. Maybe the tale will interest this newborn Karl when he is old enough, and maybe he will outdo me, but I doubt it.
Since there is no written family history for me to build on, I’ll have to start at the beginning. Most of you have noticed we do look a bit different from our fellow Mongols, although that difference is diminishing with intermarriage. Our ancestry is, strictly speaking, not Mongol. There never really was a tribe called the Mongols, but the Tungus tribes that coalesced into the core of what became the Mongols could be given first priority to the title. As time went on, many different tribes were taken into the Mongols even though they were not related. Some, like the Tatars, only provided women and children, but others came in fully and freely or were recruited to fill out the ranks. The Hanjen resisted joining since they always felt superior to Mongol “barbarians,” and in the end drove us out of what they called the Middle Kingdom. Our “tribe” was never in a position to choose to join or not join the Mongols, so our allegiance requires a bit more explanation.
According to my grandfather, our ancestors were, perhaps fortunately, obscure and forgettable until the first Karl wandered out of the primeval forest and into a no-longer-remembered village in an area called Schwabia far to the west. His apparent source led to his surname, Waldmann, Man of the Forest in the dialect of that place. This Karl was, not surprisingly, a woodcutter, and since he had considerable skill at carving, he was welcomed to the village. The family continued in modest obscurity until the next Karl, some few generations later, who was bored with wood but fascinated with iron and bucking the family traditions, moved to a city named Regensburg to learn the blacksmith trade. Being a perfectionist, he spent a long time working for many masters throughout what was called the Holy Roman Empire, the obscure if pretentiously titled principality that governed his “tribe.”
When he was admitted to the Guild as a master blacksmith, he had become a legendary sword maker, and settled in Innsbruck, a city in the same empire which was incongruously ruled by a bishop, a type of leader of the Christian religion prevalent in the far west. His descendants remained there continuing in the trade uneventfully until the next Karl came to maturity. This Karl, my great-great-grandfather, did continue the family skill of sword making, but being the second son left Innsbruck, and began to ply his trade eastward. He happened to be at the court of King Bela of Hungary, when a certain minor Christian cleric named John came to the court on his way back from performing an embassy from the pope, the leader or high priest of the Christian religion, to the Great Khan in Karakorum, Kuyuk, the second successor of the immortal Chingis. Karl managed to talk to this cleric and his companions and was fascinated by their tale. His curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to pack up his wife and two young children and go visit this Karakorum and offer his not inconsiderable talents to the Khan.
The story of his journey is a long, sometimes amusing, and sometimes sad saga, but it is of no significance to this history. Suffice it to say, after some three very eventful years, he arrived at Karakorum just in time for his wife to be delivered of a son, my great-grandfather, whom he named John for the cleric who was responsible for the trip. Whether Karl regretted his journey, my grandfather couldn’t say, but his acceptance at the court of the Khan was immediate, and he was soon hard at work at his first love, sword making. My great-grandfather John moved to Khanbalikh when the Great Khan Kubilai moved the capital there.
My great-grandfather, his brother, one of his sons, and both of his brother’s sons met an untimely end during the ill-fated second invasion of Yapon uls (a group of large islands east of the old Khanate). Of course, the first invasion was also ill-fated, but the losses incurred were considerably less. My grandfather George decided to ply his trade more humbly to avoid the dubious honor of being invited on any more such fiascoes. He moved to the outskirts of Khanbalikh, and although he continued to make swords, he also made many other things as well, catering to the tastes of the Khan’s subjects rather than the court. My father, Henry, also followed in my grandfather’s footsteps and continued the general ironsmith business, and married Christina, the daughter of a Nestorian Christian priest, Peter. In the next ten years he had three sons and three daughters. Only two of the former and one of the latter survived infancy. These were the eldest son, Henry; the second daughter, Mathilde; and the youngest son, John. Curiously, the family always used the old tribal names rather than more Mongol names. Even more curiously, we still generally do.
Father happened to befriend an officer in the Khan’s army who greatly admired his skills and frequently called between campaigns. He had confided to my father his pessimism about the future of the Khanate since much of it was in revolt and most of the army’s energy had been wasted in the fratricidal power struggles since the death of Kubilai. This officer, Kaidu, rose through the ranks and finally came to be commander of a tumen. When Dorji, the Chancellor of the Right (yes, there was also a Chancellor of the Left, and between them they ran the Khanate for the Khan) was forced from power, he invited Kaidu to join him in the north and take command of the tumen then guarding the northern border of the Khanate along the Karamuren River between the ancient home of the Khitans and the frozen lands of the reindeer-herding Tungus tribes. Since a tumen was like a self-contained mobile city with skilled artisans as well as soldiers and their families, Kaidu invited my father to join him and, of course, bring along his family. Because my father shared Kaidu’s pessimism about the future and feared for his family’s safety should the revolts reach Khanbalikh, he agreed to join him as soon as his wife had been delivered of their latest child.
Late in the winter, the child, a boy, made his appearance, and over the grave misgivings of my grandfather, my father decided it was time for another Karl in the family to commemorate the definite change the family was about to experience. My grandfather elected to remain in Khanbalikh rather than finishing his years as a nomad. It seems my mother too had misgivings of undertaking a very new and strange lifestyle but trusted my father’s judgment and went along. So it was that soon after birth, I was whisked away from the great capital to the very different northern landscape and the Ordu of Kaidu.