They rode east, and Temüjin learned in the first morning that the man could go half a day without speaking and not be troubled by it.
That was a relief, and then it was a problem.
The riding itself he could do. They changed onto the led horses when the sun was high, ate in the saddle, and slept on the ground. The body knew all of it. The body had been doing this since it was three years old, and it went on doing it while the man inside made no contribution whatsoever.
The body had no opinion at all about how much a nine-year-old boy talks to a man taking him to a sick mother.
Too little was strange. Too much was worse. And the man was not helping, because the man had decided to be gentle, and gentleness in a person who is lying to you is a bad thing to be near. It makes you want to return the favor, and being kind back is how you get caught.
So they rode, and the grass went on, and the sky did what the sky did out here, which was to be enormous and take up most of the world.
***
He asked on the second night.
Not because he had worked out that it was time. Because he needed to know the shape of the thing. That was the trouble with a lie you had already seen through: you still had to learn its dimensions, since you were going to have to live in it for days.
The fire was small—there was nothing out here to burn but dung, and it burned low and hot and without much light. The man was working at a strap with a bone tool.
"What kind of ill?"
The tool stopped.
"Your mother is strong," the man said.
"That isn't what I asked."
"No." He turned the strap over. "It came on quick. That is what I was told."
"Who told you?"
"I was told," the man said, "to come and get you."
He did not look up while he said any of it, and Temüjin understood, sitting there with the smoke going sideways.
You cannot look at a boy while you lie to him about his mother.
He stopped asking questions. He would not get the truth he knew and didn't mind anyway.
***
On the fourth day the track went up over a long ridge, and at the top of it there was a heap of stones.
Stones, piled by people who had crossed here before so that people crossing later would know where the crossing was. It had been added to for so long that it had stopped being a pile and become a small hill with intent.
The man got down. Temüjin got down after him.
The man took the waterskin off his saddle, pulled the stopper out, dipped two fingers in, and flicked them at the sky. Then at the ground. Then at each of the four quarters in turn, unhurried. The drops went into the dust and were gone immediately.
Then the man stoppered the skin and held it out.
This was the part this body would not help with. So Temüjin thought about the sequence—sky first, then ground, then the quarters, and which order the quarters went in, and how much was too much. Getting it right took time, and he was fairly sure the man noticed.
The man watched him do it and said nothing.
They put a stone on the heap each, and went down the other side.
***
They met the riders the next morning, coming west.
Three of them, moving at a pace that meant nothing good, and there was a short exchange about water and the state of the ground that neither side cared about at all.
Then one of the riders said, "You have not heard."
"Heard what," said the man.
"He is gone."
Nobody used the name. That was how Temüjin knew his father was dead. They avoided saying his name all three of them, the way you step around a hole in the dark.
"When," the man said.
"Three days after he came in. It was already in him when he rode."
The man said something else. Temüjin did not hear it, not because he was overcome with grife but he stopped listening on purpose, and was looking at a bird a long way off.
The fact he had carried only in his head for a month was now a piece of news that three men on a road were talking. He had known it before any of them and it had made no difference to anything.
Then he became aware that all four men were looking at him.
He did not do anything. He did not know how to act from the start. He sat on a horse in the sun and let them look. After a moment one of the riders said something to the man in a low voice about boys and shock, and the men agreed with each other about it, and nodded.
They did not ride much further that day.
The man got them down off the track early, tended the horses, and then sat down with his back against the tree and put his hands over his face and stayed like that for a long time.
After a while the man wiped his face with the flat of his hand, and looked over, and saw the boy standing there with the strap.
"He sent me himself," the man said. "He was on his feet when I left. He walked me out to the horses."
Temüjin said nothing.
"He said, bring my son." The man's voice went, and came back. "He did not say tell him. I asked. He said no, he will hear it soon enough, let him have the road."
And that got through.
Not the death. The death was an old fact, filed and shelved in his head. It was the instruction. Somewhere out there a man he didn't know had given an instruction, in his final hours, about his supposed son, and the instruction had been to spare him the grief on the road.
Temüjin looked at the stream and waited.
"He'll be buried by now," he said, when he could.
"Yes."
"Will there be many people?"
"Everyone," the man said. "For a while."
For a while. Temüjin knew exactly how long a while was, and did not say so.
He went and tended to the horses because it gave his hands somewhere to be. Behind him the man was sitting against the bank with his eyes shut. And somewhere east of here a camp full of strangers who had known him all his life was burying a man he had never met.
They would all look like that. Every one of them. For a while.
***
Terms
- Tengri — the Eternal Blue Sky, and the highest power there is: not a god with a face but the sky itself, which sees everything and is asked for things directly, without priests.
- the sprinkling — an offering made by dipping the fingers in milk or airag and flicking the drops to the sky, to the ground, and to the four quarters. Done at crossings, before journeys, and whenever something is being asked for. It costs a mouthful and takes a moment, and everyone does it.
- stone-heap — a cairn raised at a pass or a crossing, built up one stone at a time by everyone who goes over it. In this period it is a **waymarker**, not a shrine: it tells you where the track goes, and adding to it is courtesy to whoever comes next.
- naming avoidance — the dead are not named aloud, especially while the death is recent. People say *he is gone*, or go around the name entirely — which makes the avoidance itself a kind of announcement.