The Tiger-Headed Horseman Read online

  ‘How's my little emperor,’ said Mrs Khaan as she admired her son preening himself in the mirror. She had always thought of him as an emperor and, despite his encroaching manhood, still treated him as an infant.

  ‘Morning, Mother,’ replied an embarrassed Tengis. He hated being mothered but was too lazy to do anything for himself. ‘What's for breakfast?’

  ‘Whatever my little soldier wants,’ said his mother. She made her way over to him and tried to pinch his cheeks.

  ‘Get off, Mum!’ shouted Tengis. ‘You're so . . . embarrassing. I'm nineteen now, almost a man.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Khaan. ‘I'm so proud of my little Tengis.’

  She made to embrace her son. He stormed out of his bedroom and locked himself in the bathroom. ‘Sausages!’ he shouted through the closed door.

  Mrs Khaan smiled dreamily and made her way to the kitchen. Her son was growing up far faster than she would ever have allowed herself to believe. Still, he did like sausages and that was something. Mrs Khaan walked into the garden and pulled a string of five sausages out of a box. It was late January and the outdoor temperature never rose above freezing before mid-April. Winter was Mrs Khaan's favourite season because she was able to keep fresh food fresh longer and prepare too much too often for her son. She wanted to see him nice and round – just like Chinggis had been in his later days after the yakburgers had got hold of him and he'd taken to wearing one-piece fur suits and crooning.

  Mrs Khaan – ‘Choogi’ to her friends – had always secretly been a big fan of Chinggis, even though she knew this was a dangerous pastime. Since the time of Khad the cult of Chinggism had been all but outlawed. She had a copy of every poster that had ever been printed of him. She had mugs where his cheeky face smiled into her coffee. Every bill she paid or letter she wrote was done so with a pen bearing Chinggis's name. She had a small room in her small ground-floor apartment set aside for Chinggis. She served up Chinggis porridge on particularly cold mornings and heaped platefuls of Chinggis-branded ice cream in front of Tengis on balmy summer nights. She called her larder her Chinggiserator. She wore colourful Chinggis pyjamas to bed and equally exuberant Chinggis gowns to work. She worked in the Chinggis post office where she wore a Chinggis-branded helmet and facemask and adorned brown leather Chinggis gloves. She was a Chinggis messenger. She manned, or rather womanned, post 3276a and caught arrows from post 3277a as they sped out of Baatarulaan.

  Most of Mrs Khaan's friends were Khadists. They would poke fun at her and say she was old school but Mrs Khaan didn't care. She loved her Chinggis, she did. So did many other Ongolians. Chinggis and Khad were big business. Most businesses were called Chinggis this or Chinggis that. Those that weren't called Chinggis were called Khad this or Khad that. For every factory making Chinggis golf clubs (complete with eyeball motif) there was a Khad factory doing likewise. It forged an unhealthy consumer competition, although the resulting angry capitalist tribalism helped the Fun Brigade keep the peace. Although Chinggis had been a very bad word during the time of Khad, recent centuries had seen him re-emerge as a viable contender to the self-anointed usurper. It was seen as a guerrilla brand whereas Khad was seen as the public service staple.

  Choogi had been unfortunate during her life but liked to think that overall she had done quite well. She was annoyingly forgettable. Annoyingly, because she was just so nice to everybody and always thought the best of everyone and every situation, but she was simply one of those people whose name and face would evaporate as she left the room. Everyone could remember there was someone who was much lovelier and had a bigger heart than anyone else; they just couldn't remember exactly who that was. Born without much, Choogi had pursued and fallen in love with a junior bureaucrat who worked for the Fun Brigade in an administrative capacity. Although his job might have implied fun, Batbold was anything but. He took his role very seriously. He was in charge of procuring the large pieces of wood that the Fun Brigade used to ‘encourage’ fun among the good people of Baatarulaan. In his view, all other people were revolting and he didn't like revolution, even if it amounted to little more than a heated discussion in the media about what length fur should be worn this season.

  It had taken more than a little persuasion for him to even agree to meet Choogi. Procuring large knobbly pieces of wood was a growing and important business. When Choogi suggest they move in together it had taken him weeks to calculate the extent to which cohabitation would affect his efficiency and effectiveness. When marriage was mooted, the computer said ‘no’. Choogi resigned herself to living in sin, which was after all very much the rage in Baatarulaan (as was anything remotely related to sin). The Khaan–Khaant household (for those were their names) was not a happy one but it worked. It worked well, really well. Barely a moment, morsel or movement were wasted, so robust were Batbold's calculations.

  Choogi had been a free-spirited young woman when she met Batbold; after six months living under the same roof she seemed to barely register with him anymore. Yet Choogi loved Batbold and she knew from all the books she had read that love conquered all. She hadn't realised that love was a two-way arrangement or, if she had, she ignored it. Her Batbold was her man. Nevertheless, the headiness of bedtime frolics over Ycel spread sheets were not the gymnastics Choogi had envisaged when she bought such a large bed. It soon became apparent that Batbold had conceded to the purchase of a double-superdooper-emperor bred not for the space it offered for night-time shenanigans but because it enabled space for solitary slumber.

  When Choogi discovered she was pregnant she seriously wondered whether immaculate conception was indeed a possibility. When Batbold discovered Choogi was pregnant his computer blew up. This was something which no number of variables could model but Batbold knew from experience that a child, let alone a baby, would have an irrevocably detrimental impact on his professional effectiveness. That was something he could never entertain. Instead, Batbold simply never came home from the office – never ever.

  Choogi had known in her heart that this would be Batbold's reaction. Some part of her had prepared her for the eventuality. When it came she barely shed a tear. Her heart had still not melted after the ice of winter. It was July. She simply took herself to live nearer to those few relatives she knew about, fully realising that, while there was little prospect of them being hospitable, at least they would have faces she knew. Living alone, she promised herself that her son would not have the life she had led. He would have love, lots and lots of love. She would look after and mother him. She would make sure he had whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. She would teach him to believe in himself, to not accept criticism or second best. When Tengis was born she lived up to every one of her promises. Perhaps too much.

  3

  Chinggis had modelled Ulaanbaatar on everything he deemed to be good in the new world he had found himself governing. He respected the cultures of the nations he conquered; he adopted the spiritual knowledge of the many faiths he led; he devised a language that was recognisable across the many tongues of his realm and he encouraged freedom of thought. His city attracted the greatest minds of that time. Architects helped build magnificent palaces and temples. Artists painted enormous wall paintings that depicted the landscapes of his vast empire and he erected gargantuan statues of himself in all major cities to remind any potentially dissenting rebels that he was still watching over them. Poets and playwrights would work tirelessly to convey their love and admiration of their fine leader. In reality, the people were so proud of Chinggis that they had no real need for the bronze and marble statues or the epics or plays. Chinggis was in their soul. He had built a utopian society where everybody had a place and everybody had a chance. Certainly, there were detractors but they were few and far between. All of this had changed overnight as the result of a very spoiled little cousin with a penchant for gardening.

  Ulaanbaatar had been a fine city based on principled thought and a successful society. Baatarulaan was anything but. If Ulaanbaatar had pristine avenues and or
nately carved temples, then Baatarulaan had dingy alleyways and red light districts. Khad had, in a very short time, turned inside out everything that was good about the city. Khad had been a man with a small, very small, teenie-weenie, absolutely miniscule amount of sense but a whopping great humungous, monstrously large sense of self-importance. In his day he had demanded to be known as the ‘Right Honourable Younger Cousin of the Emperor of Emperors, Grand Deity of the Northern Territories and King of Kings Amongst Those Who Grow Exquisite Tulips But Don't Like People Finding Out About It’, which was quite a mouthful especially if you were playing a team sport and wanted your ruler to pass the ball to you. Normally, the opposition had dispossessed him and scored by the time anyone got to ‘Exquisite’. If Khad had been born the same year as Tengis, he would simply have been known as a prat. He wouldn't have been alone – there were lots of prats around. Back in the day Khad had been mightily able at surrounding himself with prats who thought that of all the prats Khad was clearly the best prat and that prats were in fact seriously superior to non-prats if only because non-prats were ‘non’ and prats had nothing ‘non’ about them whatsoever. Prats were everywhere; scientists estimated that over 90 per cent of men were prats. Chinggis had been successful, despite the fact that lots of prats worked for him. He knew they were fickle and easily intimidated. Unlike non-prats, prats were easily assuaged if they were paid well and given a job title that fulfilled some sense of self-importance.

  Upon taking control of Ulaanbaatar, or Baatarulaan as he immediately renamed it, Khad had sought to eradicate any means of tracing his vindictiveness back to him. Anyone who had been at the camp with Bold and Khasar was beheaded, as were their horses just in case they could retrace footsteps or pick up certain smells (Khad was sure he had read somewhere that horses were able to follow scents for hundreds of miles). Wiping the slate clean of his crime against Chinggis was more straightforward. He had employed Vaandals from the far northeastern borders of his empire. After they had toppled the true emperor the Vaandals had been ordered to take his body to a secret place known only by Khad buried deep within the Ongolian mountains. Once there, they were commanded to entomb Chinggis's body in ice and bury him deep inside a glacier. It was Khad's way of returning a favour to his cousin. If Chinggis had been happy to make Khad spend time in the icy north, then Khad would gladly help his cousin spend all eternity enjoying the same hospitality. After the Vaandals had disposed of Chinggis's body they had set off to return home. Khad had sent his closest men after them, pursuing them secretly across the plains to the ice bridge that separated Khad's domain from that of the Vaandals. As the hired executioners had ridden halfway across, Khad's men started a fire at their side of the ice bridge and fired a barrage of flaming tar-covered arrows to the other. The Vaandals’ breath simply melted away with the bridge into the icy Strait of Anian.

  A prat Khad may have been but he was far from stupid. Having been, in his eyes, duped by his aggressively peace-making older cousin, his mind was bent on ensuring he and his legend lasted for all times. When Khad assumed his role as emperor, Ulaanbaatar still held Chinggis close to its bosom. Not a bad word could be said against Chinggis; there simply were no bad words to say against Chinggis. He had been a great man who had made a great city and an even greater empire out of little more than dust and a healthy herd of overzealous horses (he would always hold that it was the horses themselves and not their riders that had won him his empire). Changing names was not going to be enough for Khad to convince the people to forget about his cousin. Khad had to be more cunning. Fortunately, Khad had been born with plentiful amounts of cunning and at which he excelled. A lesser man might have pulled down all the statues, paintings and billboards that exalted their enemy. Not so Khad. He had something far more ugly in mind. He wanted to help his people turn and truly hate their beloved Chinggis. He wanted them to spit every time they said his name. He wanted children to call the ugly weird kids Chinggis in the playground. He wanted Chinggis's name to become synonymous with bad things so that people in the future would say ‘Don't be a complete-and-utter Chinggis’ whenever they wanted to be rude.

  In order to attain the badness he craved, Khad would employ his preferred weapons of choice – bureaucracy and fear. He had already created the Fun Brigade, who were not having nearly enough fun in his view. Khad wanted to encourage them to have more enjoyment by having them force anyone overheard saying anything nice about Chinggis to dance in circles on one leg for an hour while reciting all of the procreative thoughts they had had over the previous week. This was sure to provide the citizens of Ulaanbaatar, or Baatarulaan, with copious amounts of hilarity. Mongolians, or Ongolians, were exceedingly wanton in the bedroom department and enjoyed days on end of frolicking pleasure with their partners. They were also adventurous, so upon hearing the threat made by the Fun Brigade they suddenly fell silent. Not only did they stop saying how fine a fellow Chinggis had been, they stopped saying just about anything. Having to recite the details of their parlour panderings was not a task to be taken lightly. They didn't mind being forced to dance – that would be real fun – but having to let their mother-in-law know exactly what they'd been doing with their son or daughter (or both) was enough to fill even the toughest Mongol, or Ongol, with abject terror.

  With the Fun Brigade patrolling the streets, Khad set about installing various practices and processes that would help further his cause. He drew up a list of ‘Chinggis crimes’ that included not only mention of his name but all things that were deemed to have been fit and proper during the rule of Chinggis. These included virtue, charity, pleasantry and gallantry. Offenders would eventually find themselves in the newly built House of Fun. The House of Fun was a large four-storey building constructed at the highest point in Baatarulaan. It could be seen from most corners of the city and, just in case anyone couldn't see it, large red neon bulbs flashed its name into the night sky accompanied by barrel-organ music. There wasn't a whole lot of fun to be had at the House of Fun other than by the wardens. The wardens, who wore brightly garish clown costumes, were handpicked for their sickly psychopathic tendencies and relished every opportunity to correct the behaviour of their guests. By the time Khad's rule came to an end no guest who had been entertained at the House of Fun had ever wanted to leave because they were ‘having so much fun’, or at least that was what was written in the letters received by the families of ‘guests’.

  Khad secretly admired the city his cousin had constructed. He privately adored wonderful architecture. He harboured feelings of adoration for open public parklands, particularly the flower beds. He even felt inwardly positive about the wide avenues that were lined by busy shops and businesses; even the statues of his deceased cousin were in his view sculpted magnificently. He refused to have any of the buildings that had been constructed during the time of Chinggis destroyed. After all, good builders were hard to come by when you needed them and there was no guarantee they would do the job you wanted even if you did find them. Instead, Khad determined to change the meaning of Chinggis's city. All schools and places of study were closed; when they reopened the interiors had been ripped out and replaced by enormous vodka and karaoke bars complete with a labyrinth of ‘private rooms’. History and geography went out the window and teachers were instructed to teach people a set of altogether more carnal lessons instead.

  Indeed, Khad completely overhauled the education system. Libraries were emptied of the classic texts and theological tomes to be replaced by thinner, more photographically oriented publications that had until then been kept under the counter or on the top shelves of less savoury shopping establishments. He pardoned all of the non-dangerous prisoners that Chinggis had put away. Mostly they were burglars, bank robbers and fraudsters, just the sort of people who would be loyal to him and help him re-educate his people. Given their understanding of how to get from A to B with minimal effort and without attracting attention, burglars were appointed as neogeography teachers, bank robbers were selected to instruct their
pupils in arithmetic and business studies. Courses in faith, drama and politics were to be given by the fraudsters. Khad knew that, within a generation, two at the most, he would rule people so ruthlessly mercenary that everything his goodietwo-shoes cousin had stood for would be rendered despicable.

  The number of bureaucratic buildings quadrupled. They absorbed all of the splendid palaces built by Chinggis and many of the larger private homes. The wealthy families who had lived there were deemed not to have laughed enough and sent to the House of Fun accordingly. The number of bureaucrats employed by Khad increased six-fold. Khad knew the surest way to slow a system down and make it far more ineffective was to employ more bureaucrats. There were now three people employed to check every application made for anything by anybody. Three times as many checks were made for anyone applying to start a business to ensure that they were credit-unworthy enough. It took three years to apply for a passport so as to discourage any cross-border movement. Khad instigated monthly censuses so that he could keep tabs on exactly what everyone was doing at any particular time. The results were inscribed on hefty stone tablets and kept in a cave that was guarded by fifty burly Fun Brigade members. Khad had inadvertently invented the world's first database. He would later lose various versions of the database as they were transported between the secret cave and his office in Baatarulaan. Although the lost tablets showed exactly how much money the city's inhabitants had in savings, and where it was stored, he was able to ensure that his incompetence was soon forgotten; in a large part due to threats made to anyone who mentioned it. Khad was an insecure little man. His view was that this knowledge he was creating would lead to power. Observers wondered how he had any time to do his day job what with all this silly and pointless bureaucratic posturing.