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 gap in it, a circle of flattened grass, paler than the grass around it, a sign of ger built in the past. 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 knew what it was. He had once read it in a book, in another life: the dwelling of a dead man is pulled down, and his cart is broken up. And the customs of the burial.
On the rise above the bend something stood against the sky on two poles. 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 connected, and strips of cloth hanging off the rope. A woman waited on either side. By the state of the ash they had been burning some days.
He knew this one as well, part of steppe traditions. The women led the horses and walked them through. He walked between the fires, and the water splashed over him from both sides at the same moment. One of them was chanting he could not follow and he did not think that was meant for him.
On the far side the man took the reins back with the water still running out of his hair and they went in.
A boy came out between the carts at full speed.
He was small and he was fast and he arrived without slowing, more weight in him than a boy of that size, and he came in hard enough that Temüjin took him against the chest and was knocked back a full step. 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 related to the events happening around him.
Seven, Temüjin thought. Nine and seven.
The arithmetic gave him the name of the boy standing before him.
He knew about the boy from the books. Now he knew his face. He memorized 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. 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 the first encounter on the road, and the preparation was worth nothing. He knew her name. He knew her people, and who she had been married to. 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 confirmed the answer. Then he made himself look up at the woman the cradle belonged to: not tall, dark, a face that had been weeping 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 of travel."
She nodded, and let him go, and turned back to the hearth.
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 answer and went away.
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 person was a stranger he had known since birth, and where a wrong name or a missing one would finish him in an afternoon.
***
The ger filled after dark and stayed full.
People came in and sat and did not much talk. 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 understood that something had happened 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 kept fixing it anyway, sitting where he had been put, while a family closed over the grief he could not find the way into.
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 tended the horses, which he had already done before the light went.
His mother, Hoelun, 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. When he looked back she was still in the doorway with the child on her hip, and she was looking at him, and she keep looking 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.
She had nine years of him to check his behaviors 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.