Börte had been quiet long enough that Temüjin knew she was working up to something.
They were lying in the grass on the high ground east of the camp, where you could see a day's ride in any direction. Below them the herds had begun drifting back toward the carts. It was the best hour this country had, and he had known it within days—everything unbearable about the place happened under the noon sun, and everything worth having happened after it.
"You're looking east again," Börte said.
"Am I."
"You've done it four times."
He had not known she was counting. He did not answer back, he went on looking east—because somewhere out along a road, his father was dying. This body's father, to be exact.
And there was nothing whatsoever to be done about it from a hilltop in Onggirat country.
He stood up and dusted off his clothes.
"Alright, we've wasted enough time. Let's go back." He offered Börte his hand. She slapped it away.
"Do you really think I would let you hold my hand?" she said, with a smirk.
"Worth the try," Temüjin said, shrugging.
They walked to their horses and started down the hill. He silently thanked this body for remembering how to handle a horse. Without the muscle memory he would have drawn eyes the moment he reached for the stirrup, and it was not good news to draw that kind of attention.
In his past life, a parent would be arrested for leaving a nine-year-old alone with a horse, let alone putting him on one. Here it was not neglect. It was instruction. The steppe did not allow for a safe and coddled upbringing, and riding was not a skill you acquired. It was survival.
Horses were an inseparable part of a Mongol's life. They were an extension of the body. You travelled with them, fought with them, and rested your soul against them. A Mongol child learned to ride by the age of three, and long before they were grown they could sleep in the saddle without falling out of it.
Temüjin held his black mare, Khar, to the winding path. Where the ground levelled out at the foot of the hill he nudged her into a trot. Börte came up behind him and pushed her horse until she was alongside.
"You'll be here for the winter camp," Börte said. It was not a question. "Everyone hobbles camels. Even you."
"I won't be here in winter."
He heard it after it was out, which was becoming a habit.
Börte turned her head. "What?"
"Someone will come for me. From my clan." He kept his eyes on the path. "In a few days."
"Nobody's coming for you." She said it flatly. "You're ours until you're grown. That's the whole point of you being here."
"I know what the point of me is."
"Then you know nobody's coming."
She let that sit a moment. Then, with narrowed eyes: "And we hardly have any visitors these days. So how do you know that?"
"If I tell you, would you let me hold your hand?" He turned to her, teasing.
"Hah! In your dreams! I'm not that curious anyway." She galloped past him, her laughter trailing behind her.
"Wait for me!" Temüjin shouted, urging Khar to follow. "Is that how you treat your future husband?"
By the time they reached the camp the sun had gone. He could just make out the carts drawn up in a ring around the gers, and two young women driving the last of the livestock into the open ground inside it. A wedge of firelight fell across the grass whenever someone went in or out of a ger. There was no other light anywhere.
The horses were the priority before anything else. A man took care of his mount before himself. Temüjin had known since his first week here that failing to do so was the sort of small thing people judged. So he walked Khar cool, checked her hooves by feel in the failing light, and let her drink before he let himself think about food.
After the horses, there was still the evening to get through.
Börte handed her reins to a boy of about six and vanished between the gers without saying goodbye. That was normal. She had never once said goodbye to him.
"You're back late."
A woman had come around the side of the nearest cart with something heavy in both arms. Half scolding. Entirely unbothered.
Temüjin smiled at her. "We lost the light."
"You lost the light." She snorted. "The pair of you would lose your heads."
She went on past him toward the fire, and he watched her go, and he had no idea who she was.
This was the hard part. Not the riding, not the language he speaks—those had come with the body, unearned. But every conversation was a room he had to tread carefully, and the method he had settled on was to be warm, and to be vague.
Aunt. Cousin. Servant. One of Dei Sechen's wives. She could have been any of them. She had spoken to him with undisguised warmth and he had answered without committing to a single fact, and she had gone away satisfied. Tomorrow he would have to do it again.
It had not got easier. He had assumed it would.
The ger where he slept sat on the western side of the ring. He stopped at the entrance.
Not for long. A heartbeat, no more. But he stopped, and he made himself lift his foot properly over the threshold instead of scuffing across it, and only then did he go in.
The body did not help with this. That was the part he had not expected. It knew horses. It knew the shape of the language. It did not know the customs of the steppe and the meanings attached to every aspect of life here, at least consciously. Because to the previous owner of this body, these are ingrained since childhood.
Inside, everything was rule. The fire at the centre, which nothing unclean ever went into. The far side facing the door, which belonged to the head of the household and to guests who mattered. West for men, east for women. And a betrothed boy of nine, who was not a guest and not yet family, had to sit where he was put.
He knew all of it. He had read all of it, once, in another life, in a century that had yet to come.
Knowing it and doing it were not the same thing. He thought about it every time, and he was fairly sure the thinking showed.
It showed to Börte.
She was already inside, legs folded under her, working at a harness strap with her fingers. She looked up when he came in.
"You do that every time," she said.
"Do what?"
"Stop at the door." She went back to the strap. "Like you're counting something."
Temüjin sat down and said nothing, which was the safest option but also not a good one.
"You never used to," she said. "Before you were sick."
The fire popped. Somewhere outside a camel complained about something and was ignored.
"I don't remember being sick," Temüjin said.
That was true. It was the most useful true thing he owned, he can push the blame to the fever he had when he arrived for all of slip-ups.
Börte made a small noise that could have meant anything at all, and did not look up again, and let it go.
Later, when the fire had been banked down to a seam of red under the ash and the household had gone quiet, he went over the mind palace.
That was what the books he had read called it, and it was a grander name than the thing deserved. It was a list of what was going to happen, in the sequence it happened in. He had put it together in his early weeks here, going over it night after night until he remembered everything he had read. It needed no paper and no ink and no script. All in his head.
What he had were events. This event and then this, and then this, and so far that had been enough, because a man who knows what comes next does not much need to know the year.
The memory palace was not an oracle and it could not be asked anything new. Every line of it had come out of books he had read, and when it ran out it would simply stop.
A major event that would turn his life upside down was coming soon. Other big events were twenty and thirty and forty years out but he made himself go the whole way along it once a week so he would remember the order of events.
Somewhere east of here, his father had taken food from Tatars on a road, because you ate what was offered, because that was the rule everyone followed.
After that would play out like the history books recorded. His father would ride on. He would reach home. He would not get better. A messenger would be sent with a story about Hoelun, his mother, being ill, and Temüjin would be called back.
He knew the order. He did not know how much of it had already happened—whether his father was still in the saddle tonight, or lying in his own ger with the poison, or dead already.
Soon. Within the week, probably.
He could not do better than that. The people who wrote it down had not thought the day was worth writing.
***
Terms
- ger — the round, felt-covered lattice tent the Mongols lived in. Not merely a shelter but a household with fixed places inside it: the hearth at the centre, the far side facing the door for the head of the household and for guests who matter, the west side for men and the east for women.
- threshold — the raised sill of a ger's door. It is stepped over, never trodden on; to tread on it is a lasting insult to the household.
- Onggirat — Börte's people, and Temüjin's hosts. A tribe of the eastern steppe long in the habit of marrying its daughters outward rather than fighting for position.
- Tatars — a powerful confederation of the eastern Mongolian plateau, and the standing enemies of Temüjin's line.
- Khar — the name of Temüjin's black mare. The word means black.
- banking a fire — settling a fire for the night rather than letting it go out. The live coals are heaped over with their own ash, which starves them of air so that they smolder instead of burning all the way.