the same age. Do you remember her? HOELUN: Yes, I remember. BORTE: She married, but it was to a Merkit. When the carnage broke out for my release, her husband was in the battle and died, and her two children perished under the hooves of horses. Her hair turned grey, and she began to go mad. A five-month-old baby was in her arms. She found him among the ruins, sucking on the breast of his dead mother. Apparently, a horse stepped on his hand, tearing off his thumb. A large clot of sintered blood was blackened at the base of the wound. HOELUN: How horrible. Is it possible for me to meet this woman? BORTE: Why do you need to? HOELUN: I collect children left without parents. I look for them after each battle. I’ve already found myself three pupils. This child can join them. Say what you like, a mother is always a mother. BORTE: She wouldn’t give him to anyone. At first she said to me, ‘You are also a future mother,’ and made to hand the child over, but then she stepped back and suddenly said, ‘No, I can’t let your bloody hands touch this angel.’ She pulled the baby away and, swaying, walked towards the Tula River. With her consciousness fading in and out, Aishan’s hair turned grey, and she became an old woman in one day. How is that possible? Where did she go to comfort a baby without a thumb, a crying, sobbing, hungry baby? Is it alive or dead? I remember, I was already leaving when she suddenly turned and screamed at me, ‘I curse you that the same fate befalls you!’ HOELUN: Do not take it to heart. They say, ‘An appropriate curse will strike the addressee, an inappropriate curse will find the one who said it.’ BORTE: ‘An inappropriate curse will find the one who said it,’ you say, but what more destructive curse could strike this poor thing? (Wipes away the tears in her eyes) HOELUN: Calm down, my dear. When Yesugei died and our relatives migrated away all at once, they left us as beggars on the desert steppe. My eldest was nine-years-old, and my youngest daughter, like that foundling, was no more than five-months-old. Having no clothes or food, we were left alone to our harsh fate. Apparently, we redeemed Aishan’s curse with our bitter, painful life
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