Beg-Arslan set aside the bowl of cool soup and, without the visitor noticing, maliciously poured boiling soup into another bowl, which he handed to the visitor. Having just seen Beg-Arslan gulping from the bowl without difficulty and not realizing the switch in bowls, the thirsty visitor eagerly took a large mouthful of the nearly boiling, greasy liquid.
Mongols pride themselves on their ability to abide both heat and cold; dropping or refusing food as too hot shows unmanly weakness. Spitting food out is an unforgivable insult. According to Carpini’s report on his visit to the Mongol court in the thirteenth century, “If a piece of food is given to anyone and he cannot eat it and he spits it out of his mouth, a hole is made beneath the tent and he is drawn out through the hole and killed without mercy.”
The visiting commander thought to himself: “If I swallow the soup, my heart will burn. If I spit it out I will be shamed.” So he pretended that nothing untoward had happened. He held the burning soup in his mouth to let it cool, and in so doing, “the skin of his palate came away and fell off.”
The commander vowed silently: “Until I die I shall never forget this hate. One day I shall think of it.”
The story of Beg-Arslan’s cruel disrespect for the commander circulated amid the rumors and stories of the steppe. The Three Guards joined Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan, and their first action was to move into the vacuum left by Beg-Arslan’s rout by invading the Ordos. With their allies in control of the Ordos, Manduhai and Dayan Khan at last had the base that they needed south of the Mongolian Plateau, from which they could launch an open attack against Beg-Arslan. Manduhai prepared for Dayan Khan to lead the expedition.
In 1479, when Dayan Khan was about fifteen or sixteen, Manduhai sent him out on his first command. Dayan Khan took “the Chakhar and the Tumed [clans], and assembled them to set out against Beg-Arslan.”
He first sent a spy out west to locate Beg-Arslan. The man chosen was from the same clan as the Three Guards commander who had been burned. The spy approached the ger of Beg-Arslan under the pretext of being sick and needing medicine. He said to Beg-Arslan: “Alas! When this poor body of mine is peaceful, there is an enemy; when it is in good health, there is sickness.” Beg-Arslan poured some alcohol in a small silver dish and gave it to him to drink.
The visitor drank it, and then in remembrance of the earlier episode when his kinsman’s palate was burned, the spy put the silver dish inside his deel. “This is a souvenir of my drinking,” he was quoted as saying, and he probably wanted to bring the stolen trophy as evidence that he had located the right person.
After the man left, Beg-Arslan became suspicious and consulted an oracle, but received an ambiguous response that left him as uncertain as before. Nevertheless, the lack of a clearly good sign from the oracle was cause enough to call for his army to gather. Because the land was dry and supported minimal vegetation, the army had been spread out over a large area, and they did not arrive in time to mount a defense for Beg-Arslan.
When he saw the dust of Dayan Khan’s approaching army, Beg-Arslan raced to his horses and fled with a handful of his guards. Dayan Khan’s soldiers saw him and pursued him. But before the Mongols could overtake Beg-Arslan, he removed his helmet and put it on one of his men in an effort to deceive the attackers, while he fled in the opposite direction from his men.
The Mongol force quickly caught the man in Beg-Arslan’s helmet, but to save himself he pointed out the direction in which Beg-Arslan had fled. “They caught up with Beg-Arslan and seized him,” according to the Altan Tobci, “and killed him at the depression of the Kiljir.” With finality, the chronicler recorded: “It is said that salt grew at the place where he was killed.”
The nomads of the steppe had an ancient tale of the wolf and a boy. The story told of a female wolf finding a human baby boy whose feet had been cut off and who had been abandoned on the steppe to die. The mother wolf nursed the boy back to health, protected him, and reared him. When the boy grew older, there was no one else to love him, so he mated with the wolf. From their offspring descended all the Turkic tribes that spread out from Mongolia. From them arose all the notable Turkic nations of history.
Dayan Khan had been born when his father, Bayan Mongke, was fourteen, but Dayan Khan passed his fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth years without an active marital relationship. Manduhai had either married or, more likely, promised to marry him when she made him khan. The Mongols did not usually make a distinction between engagement and marriage. A betrothed couple was referred to as husband and wife, but the marriage was not official until the groom-to-be completed his bride service. While exempt from the formal bride service, in a sense Dayan Khan was performing it by proving himself capable to fulfill his duties as Great Khan.
Around the year 1480, Dayan Khan and Manduhai took the final step into marriage and began to live together as husband and wife. At this time he was approximately seventeen years old, and she was thirty-three. They had already been together for ten years in a formal relationship as intended spouses. Of course, no mention survives to say when or how their intimate relationship began. Unlike some societies that crush together the marriage and sexual union, even forcing both events into the same day or within a few hours of each other, the Mongols had no such artificial scheduling. Boys and girls became engaged or married as part of a social union, but their physical intimacy remained entirely private and up to their own desire and discretion.
In the many marriages where the wife was older, she led the way with her own sense of timing and appropriateness. Certainly, in the case of Manduhai and Dayan Khan, she most likely set the agenda. Because the wives are biologically more mature than their husbands, they are often ready to bear children as soon as the husband passes through puberty.
Dayan Khan did not become a father until he was nineteen years old; probably most of the young warriors of his age were already fathers by this time. By comparison, the relationship between Dayan Khan and Manduhai, no matter when it began, seemed less hurried and somewhat more mature. In 1482, two years after their marital union, the couple produced twin boys. Over the next twelve years, Manduhai gave birth to eight children, including three sets of twins.
The Mongol mother did not normally take to bed for delivery or recovery, and she was expected to get up to care for the newborn child immediately. A nomadic people, who need to move constantly in search of water and grass for the animals or in flight from human or animal predators, could not afford to allow any members of the community, even a new mother, to remain immobile in bed for long. If Manduhai’s delivery followed common procedure, then immediately after birth the mother scrubbed the infant’s body with wool to clean it.
As she cleaned the baby, the mother usually examined the body carefully, searching for blemishes of the skin or irregularities beneath it. She also looked for the telltale sign that marked all children of the Mongol and Turkic tribes, the blue spot. The spot, which could easily be mistaken for a large bruise by someone unfamiliar with it, appeared clearly at the base of the spine, just at the top of the crack between the buttocks, and after a few years it faded away. For the Mongols, the spot had a nearly sacred significance that marked them clearly and distinguished them from other people. It may have been caused by the blood vessels showing through the very white skin on a place in the body with little fat to obscure the vessels; or perhaps, as they were taught, the Blue Spot marked them as the children of the Eternal Blue Sky. From long interaction with other peoples, the Mongols and Turkic tribes had taken this mark on the child as a distinctive separation that made them special as the Blue Spot People.