“I myself am not in good health,” he reasoned. “I am without male descendants, and after I am dead, my queens and people will be his.” The charges, rumors, and conjecture churned in the khan’s mind. “Maybe they are true,” he speculated to those around him. The khan wondered if the boy was rushing too quickly ahead, as though he had already replaced the khan and need not respect him any longer. “It is bad that, starting now, he should have such excessive desires.”
Wavering in his opinions, the khan sent another person to talk to the young prince, to tell him that a second set of allegations had been made against him. The khan wanted his young heir to defend himself, reaffirm his loyalty, and remove the stain of the charges against him.
“The khan asks,” said the envoy, “what reasons do you have to be against me?”
The prince immediately remembered the warning of Ismayil that a messenger would come to trick him. The prince became highly tense and agitated, but in his confusion he did not know how to answer. Having always depended on his charisma and good luck to solve his problems and propel his interests, he had no education and no words with which to devise a strategy or argue his own case. The prince merely stared nervously at the messenger and said nothing.
The envoy reported back to the khan about the prince’s frantic state and that the prince refused to answer the chargers.
The khan accepted the silence as guilt, and he now convinced himself that he had been betrayed by the young prince. “It is like this, it is true that he has evil intentions towards me,” he said. The khan openly deliberated on the plight of the Mongol nation and the most appropriate action to preserve it. The khan considered the painful consequences for the nation if it had no khan. Yet, perhaps in confusing his own emotions toward the prince with the needs of the state, he concluded: “The people do not need a ruler like him.” The boy had strayed too far, too fast. “So saying, the khan became enraged.”
Since the days of his infancy when his great-great-grandmother Samur had saved him from the wrath of his grandfather Esen, flight had been the only response that the prince had learned in the face of grave danger. The Golden Prince heard about the khan’s anger, and without trying to explain his case or clarify his actions, he impulsively fled the royal camp in fear.
Ismayil waited, and then the khan came to him with his decision. He told Ismayil to gather the army and go after the prince. Once again, the Mongol nation headed into civil war. People had to choose sides between the old, but still ruling, khan and the upstart prince, who had so enthralled the khan, the court, and the people, but who was now labeled a traitor and rebel. Few people came to the prince’s side.
Perhaps the khan remembered that after Genghis Khan’s gift of a golden belt to Jamuka, the two men, who had sworn eternal friendship three times, only stayed together for a year and a half. The khan and his nephew were parting in much the same way that Jamuka lamented his parting from Genghis Khan. “Together we ate food that is not to be digested,” Jamuka said. “To each other we spoke words that are not to be forgotten.” Then the words of outsiders drove them apart. “We parted for good saying … that we had exchanged weighty words, the skin of my black face peeled off in shame.” But he deeply regretted the separation. “And so I have been living unable to come near you, unable to see the friendly face of my sworn friend the Khan. Saying to myself that we had exchanged unforgettable words, the skin of my red face came off in shame.” In the separation from one another, Jamuka concluded, each of them had to live “with a long memory.”
The prince had few options open to him, and he had no one to whom he could turn. He suddenly concocted a strange plan to flee to Manduul’s and Ismayil’s nemesis: the father of the queen with whom he was accused of having the affair. Perhaps with Beg-Arslan’s approval they might together remove the old khan, and then the prince would marry Yeke Qabar-tu, produce an heir with her, and thereby make Beg-Arlsan the grandfather of the next khan.
Fearful of arriving unannounced in Beg-Arslan’s camp and confronting him alone, the prince sought out Borogchin, a Borijin woman described as Bayan Mongke’s sister and as Manduul and Manduhai’s daughter. She was most likely a niece of Manduul and thus, under the Mongol system of kinship, would be equivalent to a sister for Bayan Mongke and a daughter to Manduhai. She had been married to Beg-Arslan or his son. The prince found the camp, which consisted of several gers for different wives and relatives. Borogchin received him warmly, but she and her two sons immediately moved to hide him in their ger.
She did not think that his plan for redemption would succeed. Beg-Arslan would not be so easily turned against Manduul and Ismayil, two underlings who, as far as Beg-Arslan knew, had always followed his leadership in the past. The prince would not find protection from Beg-Arslan, who much preferred having an easily controlled old man as khan rather than this impetuous, and apparently easily frightened, youth.
The nature of Borogchin’s relationship to the young prince is not clear, but someone recognized the beautiful chestnut horse of the prince hobbled nearby to graze. As soon as Beg-Arslan heard, he came looking for the rider.
When Beg-Arslan could not find the prince, he confronted Borogchin, demanding to know where the young man was hiding. Fearful of lying to him, but unwilling to expose the prince, she replied with a question. “If he comes around me should I hand him over to you?” she asked Beg-Arslan.
“If I see him near you,” Beg-Arslan responded in boastful anger, “I shall eat his flesh and drink his blood.” He rubbed his hands across his face and hair; it was recorded that he became so agitated that his nose began running. He smeared the yellow mucus across the tip of his nose and stormed away.
Later, in a ruse to lure the prince out of hiding, Beg-Arslan left to go hunting. Borogchin used his absence to encourage the prince to flee, and Beg-Arslan’s spies failed to see the prince leave. When they could not find his horse, they knew he had escaped and they sent word to Beg-Arslan.
The warlord sent a messenger back to camp demanding to know where the chestnut horse had gone. Borogchin insolently responded that she had already sent the prince safely home, and she demanded to know why Beg-Arslan wanted to harm her relatives when she never did anything to harm his. “Have I enmity towards your kin?” She claimed that the prince was only a clan brother of hers. “Have I jealousy towards friendly relatives?” she defiantly asked.
By so defying as powerful a man as Beg-Arslan, she knew that her life and the lives of her sons might be in danger. To protect them, Borogchin then sent her sons away; however, she decided to stay behind to face Beg-Arslan’s wrath. “I myself will die,” she explained to the boys as she bade them farewell. After that encounter, no further mention of Borogchin occurs in the chronicles.
Having failed to find refuge with Beg-Arslan, the Golden Prince fled this time out into the Gobi in search of sanctuary with his wife, Siker, and their son. The Gobi, however, does not keep secrets. Word soon reached the Mongol royal camp that the prince had returned to his former home, and Ismayil set out in pursuit of the young prince. Always fortunate enough to hear when someone came after him, the prince again abandoned his wife and son and fled farther east into the Gobi.
Ismayil found the camp of the prince’s family and seized it, all the animals and everyone there. He even claimed Siker, the prince’s wife, for himself. Somehow in the mêlée, the baby boy born to Siker and the prince disappeared.
For the moment, Ismayil’s work seemed done. He had rid the Mongol court of both General Une-Bolod and the young prince. With the prince’s wife as his own, he now returned south, where the Mongols were having some renewed success raiding the Chinese, and where Beg-Arslan, still his overlord, was planning a full assault on the Chinese in the Gansu Corridor and the territory of Ningxia.