During the summer, Temüjin built a weir in the shallows above the riverbend.
He had walked that stretch of water for three days in the spring before he put the first stone down to setup the enclosure. Then he cut willow branches to create a narrow opening towards the encloure. Fish swimming in high tide got into the trap but couldn't get out when the water got low. It had cost him the whole summer and most of Khasar's, and Qachiun's, and Temüge's under loud protest.
Now it worked without anybody. You came down in the morning and found that it had been working all night, full of fish.
Temülün was in the pen to the knees, handing the fish out two at a time and telling everybody what she was doing while she did it. Khasar took them up the bank and laid them out on the grass in rows, because rows were what he had decided on.
Temüjin stood in the water at the with his hands at the entrance and let himself be pleased for his second successful project.
Then Bekter and Belgütei came over the rise from the north with the horses walking, and they had been gone two days to scout the surroundings.
***
Bekter ate before he said anything, and Sochigel took his coat off the peg by the door and beat it out against the frame while he ate.
Then he said, "There's a fold two days north, back off the water. Old grass in it, standing height, nobody's been in it in years. Dead wood on the north side of it, dry."
Hoelun did not stop what she was doing. "Water?"
"Snow."
"How much wood?"
"Enough to burn all winter and start the spring on."
"How far with the carts?"
"Two days. Three if the small ones walk."
She turned that over for a moment, checking it against a list she kept in her head. Nobody talked while she did it. Belgütei watched her with his mouth slightly open, waiting for her verdict.
"Then we go when the fish are down," she said.
Nobody said anything else. Sochigel got up and began going through the felts that had gone thin to mend before a move; Temülün asked whether the fold had trees in it and was told no; Khasar heard the entire exchange, took no view on it whatsoever, and went back out to his fish rows.
Temüjin sat on the door side and understood that the household had turned round while he was in the river.
***
He went to Bekter that evening, and finally ranted.
"The fish comes twice," he said. "There's one in the spring. We lose it if we move."
"We lose it this year." Bekter had a hoof up on his knee and was filing it with a knife, and he went on doing it while he talked. "The grass here's eaten to the root and there's no wood within an hour's walk. Nine horses on this bend through a winter won't be useful to us."
That was true. Temüjin had counted the horses against the grass himself in the summer and had come to the same conclusion and had left it to deal with later, because the weir had been his main focus.
"We take this catch," Bekter said. "All of it. Your mother dries it and we carry it, and it feeds the nine of us till the melt."
"And we have to leave the weir." Temüjin added to his complaint.
Bekter put the hoof down and stood up and looked at him, and there was nothing in his face except what he was about to say.
"It's good work. I went and looked at it before I ate." He wiped the knife on his leg. "We'll come back and see if it's still standing."
There it was, and it was said kindly, and it was not a thing anybody could take hold of.
Temüjin heard his own voice go somewhere he did not want it. "It took us a summer to build."
"I know what it took." Bekter said it without any edge at all. "It fed the lot of us for a month. Nobody's saying otherwise."
And then Hoelun, without even turning added: "He went and looked at the country. You didn't."
***
He went down to the water when there was still light and stood on the bank above the gap, lost in thought.
The fold was right. He had not one argument against the fold. Bekter was right about the grass, right about the wood and snow, and if they stayed on this bend they would come out of the winter on foot.
The weir would not be here in the spring. He knew that before he had finished making it. The ice would take the brush out first. Then the melt would come down and roll the stones flat. The gap would silt. By the time anybody came back there would be a line of round stones under a foot of gravel.
In the other life he had lived among things that stayed where they were put. You built, and then it lasted even if you went away for a long while. Nobody in that life had ever had to ask what a thing was worth once it was two days behind them.
He felt hurt by the responses so he tied the hurt against losing the weir, but that was not it. It went on somewhere behind it.
If he had been the one who rode north, he would have found the same fold. He would have come back on the second evening and said the same three things about grass and wood and snow, and Hoelun would have turned the household round on them exactly as she had, and they would be leaving in the same week for the same place.
And it would not have hurt at all.
So it was not the fold, and it was not the weir.
It was that Bekter had gone north without being sent, and come back, and said what was in it, and the whole household had turned round on him before the fish were off the grass. It had taken one evening. It would take one evening the next time, and the time after that, until it was simply what happened when Bekter said something—and Bekter was fourteen, and would be saying things for forty years.
He had a sentence for that and he was never going to get to use it. Every version of it began with himself, and the words that would just come out as a boy who wanted to be in charge of something.
He reached for his mind palace, out of habit, to see whether he could mount an argument about a fold in the hills two days north of a bend on the Onon.
It did not. It had never had anything of that sort in the first place.
***
They spent three days loading, in the end, because everything took longer than Bekter had said it would and he did not seem surprised by that either.
On the second morning he came past with a roll of line over his shoulder and stopped.
"You know how the drying goes better than I do." He shifted the roll. "Say where we should put it up there. I don't want it in the wind."
He meant it. He had thought about it and decided that the boy who had hung forty fish under a roof would be the most knowledgeable, and asked without any hidden motive.
"I'll look when we get there," Temüjin said.
"Good."
And he took the drying line away to the cart, and Temüjin stood with the camp coming down around him and feeling the gravity of this household gradually shifting farther away from him.
He did not go back down to the water to look at his creation one last time.
The two fires went out on the last morning, an hour apart, and neither woman went near the other's. Hoelun let hers down to nothing and lifted the stones out of it and carried the ash to the far edge of the camp in a hide, and put it where nobody would be walking. Sochigel did the same at hers when it was cold enough to touch. Temülün wanted to know why they could not do this together and was told to go and find the small kettle instead of an answer.
Then the felts came off the frames and the frames came apart, and the ground under the two gers came up pale and flat and full of the small rubbish of the years they had been on it.
The weir went on working behind them all that morning while they loaded, and it went on working after they had gone, for as long as it stood.
***
Terms
- a fold — a hollow in open country, where the ground itself takes the wind off
- the winter camp — the place a household moves to for the cold months, and the one piece of ground in the year that is chosen rather than drifted into.
- the hearth — the fire at the centre of a ger. Where a man has had more than one wife, each wife keeps her own. A household of two gers is a household of two fires, lit separately, put out separately, and belonging to two different lines of children.
- **the fish weir** — ancient fish trap.