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 with the felts pulled over them and the horses on long lines nearby. 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 be kind back, 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, that he had been given the answer to something he had put away four nights ago and had not been able to place.
You cannot look at a boy while you lie to him about his mother.
He took it off the windowsill of his mind palace and put it where it belonged, on the shelf with the rest of the man.
Then he came back to the fire, which had not gone anywhere, and found that having solved it made no difference at all.
He stopped asking questions, and the not-asking was its own problem, and he knew it, and there was nothing to be done about that either.
On the fourth day the track went up over a long ridge, and at the top of it there was a heap of stones.
Nothing had been done to it. It was stones, piled by people who had crossed here before so that people crossing later would know where the crossing was, and 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 skin off his saddle, worked 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 way a man does a thing he has done ten thousand times and has never once thought about.
The drops went into the dust and were gone immediately.
He said nothing out loud. His mouth moved a little and that was all, and whatever he was asking for, he was asking the sky for it, and Temüjin—standing two paces behind him holding two sets of reins, knowing precisely what the man wanted and precisely how it had already turned out—found that he had nothing at all to do with his face, and for once it did not matter, because nobody was looking at him.
Then the man stoppered the skin and held it out.
This was the part the body would not help with. It knew reins and it knew the language and it had never in its life been asked to do a thing that lived in the head instead of the hands. So Temüjin thought about it—sky first, then ground, then the quarters, and which order the quarters went in, and how much was too much—and he got it right, and getting it right took work, and he was fairly sure the work showed, the way it always showed.
The man watched him do it and said nothing.
They put a stone on the heap each, because that was what you did, 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 both parties pulled up because out here you did, 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 it was true before another word was spoken—that they had gone around it, 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 but because he had stopped listening on purpose, and was looking at a bird a long way off that was doing nothing in particular.
The thing he had carried by himself for a month was now a piece of news that three men on a road were passing around like a waterskin. That was all it had ever been going to be. He had known it before any of them and it had made no difference to anything, and hearing it out loud did not lift it off him, and he had somehow expected that it would.
Then he became aware that all four men were looking at him.
He did not do anything. He had nothing to do it with. He sat on a horse in the sun and let them look, and after a moment one of them said something to the man in a low voice about boys and shock, and the men agreed with each other about it, and were relieved.
They did not ride much further that day.
The man got them down off the track early, into a fold in the ground by a stream, and saw to the horses, and then sat down with his back against the bank and put his hands over his face and stayed like that for a long time.
Temüjin watched him from the other side of the horses, and he stood holding a strap he had already finished with and understood with total clarity that he could not go over there.
Not would not. Could not. There was nothing in him to bring.
After a while the man wiped his face with the flat of his hand, the way you wipe rain off, 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 and walked past a hundred times. It was the instruction. Somewhere out there a man he could not have described to anyone alive had stood in the dark holding a horse and given an instruction about a boy he thought was his son, and the instruction had been to spare him the sadness on the road.
Temüjin looked at the stream and waited until it stopped.
"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 turned that over, and knew exactly how long a while was, and did not say so.
He went and did the horses, because the horses came first, and because it gave his hands somewhere to be. Behind him the man was sitting against the bank with his eyes shut and his face wrecked and open, and around them the grass went on for a day's ride in every direction, 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, all at once, for a while.
And he would be standing in the middle of it holding a strap.
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.