They came down to the Onon on the sixth day, and Temüjin saw the gap before he saw anybody at all.
The camp sat in a bend of the river, carts drawn up, gers inside them, the herds out on the far bank. It was a ring like every ring he had lived in for a month. But there was a hole in it. A circle of flattened grass, paler than the grass around it, with the black eye of a hearth at the centre and nothing standing over it. Beside the circle lay a cart that had been taken apart—not worn out and not broken in use. Taken apart, the axle split, the shafts snapped short, and left where anyone coming down to the water would see it.
He had read what it was, in the same warm room, in the same century that had not been built yet: the dwelling of a dead man is pulled down, and his cart is broken up. He had read it and gone on to the next thing, because it had been a fact about a people and not a hole in a camp with the grass still lying flat inside it.
On the rise above the bend something stood against the sky on two poles, and nobody had to tell him what it was.
The man pulled up short of the carts.
Two fires had been built at the edge of the camp, four or five paces apart, and between them stood two spears with a rope run head to head, and strips of cloth hanging off the rope and turning in the wind. A woman waited on either side. By the state of the ash they had been burning some days.
Temüjin got down.
He knew this one as well, and for once knowing it was no work at all, because there was nothing here he had to get right. The women took the horses at the head and walked them through. He walked between the fires with the heat coming at him from both sides, and the water went over him from the left and the right at the same moment. One of them was saying something low and continuous that he could not follow and he did not think that was meant for him.
He stood in it the way a boy stands in weather.
On the far side the man took the reins back with the water still running out of his hair, and that was all of it, and they went in.
A boy came out between the carts at a dead run.
He was small and he was fast and he arrived without slowing, more weight in him than a boy that size had any business carrying, and he came in hard enough that Temüjin took him against the chest and lost a fistful of his own coat sideways for it. Up close he was all cropped black hair and sunbrowned skin and a half-healed scab going pale on one cheekbone. For a moment the boy said nothing at all. Then he let go, stepped back, and started talking.
He talked about the horses. He wanted to know whether the led horse was theirs now or borrowed. He said a hawk had come down on the ducks by the water two days ago and taken one off the top of the flock and that everybody had missed it except him. He said there was a lamb with a bad leg that he had been given to keep, and that it was his, actually his, not the household's.
He did not ask about the road. He did not ask what Temüjin had been told, or when, or who had told him, or how he had taken it. He did not ask one question with a shape that would have to be thought about before it was answered.
Seven, Temüjin thought. Nine and seven.
The arithmetic gave him the name of the boy standing before him.
The name had been on its peg since his first month here: a name out of a list, he read once in the future. He memorize the boy's face and features into his mind palace along with his name.
"Hold this," he said, and put the end of the lead rope into the boy's hand, and turned away to get the felts off the second horse.
The boy held it.
He did not ask why, or for how long, or why Temüjin could not hold it himself, or any of the other four things a seven-year-old has ready for that sentence. He simply held the rope and went on talking about the lamb.
Temüjin got the felts down and stood with them in his arms a little longer than the job wanted.
It was the first easy thing in a month.
Inside the ring the camp was quiet in the particular way of a place where a great deal had already been done.
He looked for his mother.
He had prepared for it on the road the way you prepare for a river crossing, and the preparation was worth nothing, because he had nothing to prepare with. He knew her name. He knew her people, and who she had been married to before, and how she had been taken, and by whom, and what that would cost this family in twenty years. He knew everything about her except one little thing.
He did not know which of these women she was.
There were six or seven of them at work near the big hearth and they were all the right age and they were all doing the same things.
One of them had a cradle beside her.
He looked at it for some time. A child born this year, in this camp, in this household. He ran it through his head twice, because he did not trust himself, and both times it came out the same. Then he made himself look up at the woman the cradle belonged to: not tall, dark, a face that had been used hard and recently, a mouth that did not seem to have moved in days.
He had found his mother.
She crossed the ground fast and took his head in both hands and held it and looked at him, and did not say anything for long enough that the women behind her went back to what they had been doing.
"You are thin," she said.
"It was six days."
"It was six days," she agreed, and let him go, and turned back to the hearth.
Nothing came up in him to meet it. He noticed that the way the tongue notices a tooth that is gone—a place reporting that something is not in it, no pain anywhere in the report—and then he put it down and got on, because a boy standing still in the middle of a camp is a boy being looked at.
An old man he had never seen came and stood in front of him, and put a hand on his shoulder, and said that his good father had spoken of him at the end.
Temüjin managed to respond with a short sentence. The old man nodded as though it had been the right thing and went away.
It took until the fire was lit for him to understand what he had just been handed.
Nobody had said the name. Not the old man. Not his mother, not the boy with the lamb, not the three men who had come one after another to stand near him and say something brief and leave. They had said your good father. They had said him, and the one who is gone, and twice they had simply let a sentence stop early and everybody in earshot had understood it perfectly.
He had read this too but he had never once thought about living it—in a camp where every second person was a stranger he had known since birth, and where a wrong name or a missing one would finish him in an afternoon. For as long as this held, the whole camp was talking around something, and a boy who talked around everything did not show up in it.
A custom he knew only from a book was carrying him better than anything he had managed on his own.
The ger filled after dark and stayed full.
People came in and sat and did not much talk. At intervals somebody's shoulders would go and somebody else would put a hand out without looking up. The three-year-old went round the whole ger twice trying to find someone who would play with him, could not find a taker anywhere, and fell asleep at last against the leg of a man he did not belong to. The five-year-old had worked out that something enormous had happened and had not yet worked out what, and kept checking the faces of the adults to see how frightened he was supposed to be.
And Temüjin sat in it with a strap in his hands.
It had come off the saddle and it did not need mending. He worked at it anyway, sitting where he had been put, while a family closed over the grief he could not find the edges of.
He had seen this coming from a fold in the ground five days back and had thought about it every hour since, and the thinking had been no use whatsoever. There was still nothing in him to bring. He was not going to invent it.
So he sat among them and learned their faces by lamplight, and let them think he was quiet because he was nine.
When he could not sit in it any longer he went out and did the horses, which he had already done before the light went.
His mother came out and found him at it.
She did not say anything about the horses. She stood just outside the firelight with the youngest on her hip and watched him pick up a hoof he had checked twice, and when he set it down she said, "Come in. It's cold."
So he came in.
At the door he stopped. A heartbeat, no more, exactly as long as it had ever been. He put the thing together the way he had put it together at every door for a month—over, not on, and lift it properly—and he lifted his foot over the threshold of his mother's ger and went inside and sat where he was put.
Behind him she had not moved.
When he looked back she was still in the doorway with the child on her hip, and she was looking at him, and she went on doing it a moment longer than there was any reason to.
Then she came in and set the child down and began banking the fire, and said nothing about it at all.
She had nine years of him to set it against and the worries in his heart grew.
Terms
- the dead man's dwelling — the ger a man dies in is pulled down and his cart broken up, and the wreck is left in place. What remains is a circle of flattened grass in the ring, and a gap where a household used to be, both of which can be read from a long way off.
- the horse on poles — a horse is killed at the burial and eaten by those who attend; its skin is stuffed and raised on poles above the grave, where it stands until the weather takes it.
- passing between the fires — a household with a death in it is unclean, and so is anyone entering it. Two fires are built with a rope strung between two spears above them, and people, horses and goods are walked through the gap while women to either side throw water and speak over them.
- your good father — the form used in place of a dead man's name. Good here means Iate. Around a fresh death the name itself is not said at all, and the sentence is allowed to stop early instead.