Khasar shot the lark resting on the top of a thistle on the way back from the horses with a blunt arrow that knocked it down with a small dull sound, like a knuckle on a pot.
He was pleased with it out of all proportion, because it was such a small bird at fifty paces and with the wind across, and he walked the whole way back holding it up by the feet and boasting his achievement.
"You have it," he said, and pushed it at Temüjin's chest. "I've eaten. I ate at the horses."
He had not eaten at the horses. He lied that sort of thing as easily as other people cleared their throats.
Bekter and Belgütei came up from the water before they reached the gers, and Belgütei said something admiring about the shot, and Bekter took the lark out of Temüjin's hand — it was going to the household anyway, and put it with the rest of game they were carrying.
It was a lark. Nobody said anything about it, then or afterwards.
***
Temüjin tried to convince his mother again that night, and he said it badly on purpose, because he had learned in the spring what was the result of arranging something carefully.
"We could go."
Hoelun was doing something to a strap and did not look up. "Go."
"You. Me, Khasar, Qachiun, Temüge, Temülün." He had counted them so many times that they came out in one breath. "We take our share and we go."
She set the strap down, which she did not often do, and looked at him for a while.
"Take them where?"
He had the answer ready and it was a good one. There was a man in the west, the head of the Kereit. Years ago he and Yesügei had stood in front of witnesses and called each other anda, They had fought for each other; the whole country knew about their bond. That man was alive. That man had grass, and men, and a camp you could see from a long way off.
He got all of it out. His mother listened to the end without moving.
"And what do you bring him?"
"He was my father's anda."
"He was." There was no argument in it. "What do you bring him?"
***
He sat there without response and it got worse the longer he sat.
He had known the answer before she finished asking. He had eight people, nine horses that were not a gift because they were the difference between the family walking and the family riding, some felts, a pot, and a claim on something two men had done in front of witnesses before he was born.
There was nothing in him to bring. What he had was for survival, not for currying favors. More so underneath the fact is the final decision he had been delaying for a week.
A household does not go and stand next to another household. There is no such arrangement and the winter neighbors had shown him what the nearest thing looked like: people who share a fold and lend a horse and nothing else. That is what you get from a camp you are beside.
What you get from a camp you are in is different, and it has a word, and the word is not a kind one when you are the example of it. You come to a man. After that you are his, and so is everything that came with you, and there is no version where you are his for the grass and your own for everything else.
He thought it over and over but the answer is the same.
Six of them ride west. They are taken in, because the man is not a monster and the claim is not nothing and a widow with five children arriving out of the east is just a normal occurrence. The horses go into a herd that is not theirs. Khasar shoots for somebody else's meat pole. And his mother, who had been a widow alone for four years with nobody's leave to ask for anything, becomes a woman in a great man's camp with no husband and no brothers and nothing behind her at all.
He could not get past that. He turned the plan over from every side and every side had his mother in it.
The whole point of the last four years, every avenue he looked for, was that she should not be handed on to somebody. And the door out of it opened straight into a camp of two thousand people where the question of who she belonged to would be settled by men he had never met, on a scale where nobody would even have to raise their voice about it.
***
Hoelun waited a long time and then picked the strap back up.
She did not tell him no. Neither she had told him no about the split. She had let him have every word of it. This time she asked him two questions and then sat there and let him arrive the conclusion on his own.
"There's the other thing," she said, after a while.
"I know."
"Say it, then."
He did not want to, and he said it, because she had asked.
"Sochigel."
Hoelun nodded once, at the strap.
Assuming they leave, six of them riding west, and behind them, in a fold in the hills, there is a woman with two boys and no horses to speak of and no man, in a camp of two gers that has become a camp of one.
He knew exactly what that was. He had watched it done. He had stood on frozen ground at ten years old and watched forty households rode out of a valley in good order, with nobody hurrying and nobody ashamed, all of them perfectly certain they were doing an ordinary thing, and he had gone to every ger, asking them not to and they still left the same.
Whatever he had thought about those people that morning, this was the same act. He may not directly kill the mother and two boys but it was still the same result.
***
Temüjin went out to the horses because it was that or sit still.
Every plan he put forth on that week had developed. Behind each one was a situation he could not put his mother in.
And that was it, he thought, standing in the dark with his hand flat on Khar's neck. Not one person had refused him anything, in a whole year of asking. Bekter had said yes. The old man had heard him out and fed him. Toghan had wanted to. His mother had asked him two questions and let him work. There was nobody in this world he could point at and say that one stopped me.
He had come to understand that a world where no one stops you is not the same as a world where you can do things.
He was thirteen and he had run out of ways.
And the only method was left in his hand. He kept away from it and it made no difference. He could feel the shape of it through the ground, like a horse coming before you hear one.
Khar put her head over his shoulder, wanting salt, and got none, and stayed there anyway.
He stood out there until his feet went numb, and then he went in and did not sleep for a long while, and did not decide anything that night.
***
Terms
- the blunt head — a godoli: an arrow with a round knob of horn or wood instead of a point, sometimes pierced so that it whistles. A broad arrowhead would ruin what little there is to eat.
- coming to a man — the only way one household joins another. Afterwards you are his: your animals go into his herds, your sons work where he says, and your people are counted in his camp.
- Kereit — a great people of the west, Christian in their own fashion. Their head and Temüjin's father once swore themselves anda but it is up for interpretation what a son can ask.