He had counted for six weeks without saying a word about it. The first thing he did with the numbers, when he finally spent them, was walk Khasar down to the water one cold spring morning and tell him to stop wasting the easy shots.
"Don't shoot the ones you know you'll hit," he said. "Shoot the ones you're not sure of."
Khasar thought about that for the length of two steps. "I'll miss more."
"Yes."
"And spend the morning finding arrows."
"Yes."
Khasar shrugged the bow up onto his shoulder and went. He did not ask why a person would want to miss more. That was the thing about Khasar, and it was a thing Temüjin had come to lean on when he could not explain in a few words to his brother.
***
He had worked it out over the winter, flat in the grass with a number running in his head. Khasar shot well and got no better at it. He took the same marmots at the same distances and hit most of them, and the hitting taught him nothing, because he already knew how to do it. The learning was all in the misses, and Khasar had been quietly arranging his mornings to have as few misses as a boy could—which was the sensible thing, and the reason he would have stayed exactly like this without improvement for the rest of his life.
So the first thing Temüjin had to talk him into was failure. More misses, on purpose, out where thirty and forty arm-spans of grass lay between him and a marmot's head. It went against everything a hungry boy knew. Khasar did it on the second morning without an argument, because his brother told him to.
He had tried the bow himself once, early, to find out whether there was anything in his own hands worth passing on. There was not.
He knew how it was meant to go. The strength of it lived in the thumb—every child here knew that before it could walk, and he knew it from a book, where it was written that a boy's thumb was greased with fat off his first kill and the whole art of the bow was built around that one joint.
He knew it. His thumb did not.
His hands wanted to do it the way he had been shown to shoot in the videos, in a century that had not arrived yet, with three fingers and a little metal sight to squint through. That way was worth nothing here and would never be worth anything. He drew the string back a hand's width, shaking, and let go, and the arrow slid into the grass ten paces off. Khasar laughed at him with no mockery in it at all and went and fetched it back.
So he would teach the boy nothing about shooting. He had known that before he picked the bow up. What he had was not in his hands. It was in his head instead, and it came to almost nothing. He could count. No one here ever had.
***
The arrows were the trouble, and the arrows were not his to risk.
There were never many, they belonged to the household and not to Khasar, and every one of them was counted. Missing on purpose meant more of them out in the grass, further out, in the reeds and the shallows, and it meant Khasar on his knees half a morning combing a slope for an arrow he had put there deliberately. He never lost one for good. He had always gone after every arrow he missed with, in any weather.
Making them back was another skill Temüjin did not have. He watched Khasar and Belgütei sit of an evening straightening shafts over the coals, fitting a blunt juniper head for the larks and saving the good heads for the marmots, mending a split nock with a strip of bark, and knew there was nothing there he could add but a tally of how many were left.
***
By midsummer the small bow had stopped costing Khasar anything.
It had been made for another boy and cut down to fit him, and Khasar had grown since. He could hold it at his ear all morning and his arm never shook. Inside the distance the bow could reach, he hardly missed at all.
The number of missed shots stopped moving. Temüjin kept it two weeks longer to be sure, and it sat where it was, and a count that does not move has nothing in it to work on.
He needed a heavier bow. A heavier bow was not something this family had lying spare.
What they did have, for the first time since the spring they were left behind, was a small stack of marmot skins—the overflow of a brother bringing in more than the household could eat at a sitting. It was the only surplus the household owned.
Temüjin took eight of the skins half a day downriver, to a camp of three gers that had come together for the summer, and traded them for a bow. It was a plain thing, a single fir stave with nothing backing it, a big boy's self-bow and not a man's, but it was stiff. Khasar could not hold it drawn past a breath the first time he tried, and his first ten shots with it were as bad as before.
He watched his brother struggle and miss and struggle, and knew the count would climb again, which meant the learning had started again, which was the whole of the point.
Hoelun watched eight skins ride off down the river and said nothing about it. She had meant to make a coat. She watched them go, and then, for a moment, she watched him.
***
The other thing he made Khasar do was stop.
He had no reason for it he could say out loud, only the number, which told him that Khasar's fifth hour on the grass was worse than his second, and the shots taken while being worn out taught the hands the wrong lesson.
To everyone else it looked like the unusual thing. A household this thin could not carry an idle boy, and here was the boy who could shoot being led in off the grass by his brother before midday to sit in the shade. Belgütei said something about it, more than once. Even Hoelun, who missed nothing, watched Khasar come in with the sun still high, and watched him for a while, decided to not say anything in the end.
Temüjin said none of what he knew, because none of it would have come out sounding like anything but a lazy boy's brother covering for him. He took the looks and kept the number.
And it worked.
It did not work fast, and it did not work the way a boast would. Khasar did not turn into a marvel over one summer, the kind people ride a day to watch. What happened was smaller and slower than that, and you could only see it if you were keeping a number. Across the season the long misses came down a little, and stayed down. He was bringing something back two mornings out of three, where it had been one.
Two mornings in three is not a miracle. In a household with nothing, it is a coat that gets finished after all. It is everybody getting through the cold months.
By autumn there were skins to spare again, and the marmots hung on the pole in a row anyone riding past the bend could count.
The gain in one season was almost nothing. It only came to something laid end on end, season after season: a boy of nine who got a little better every year instead of staying the same was a different creature after five years than after one. Temüjin had the years. He was in no hurry.
It was, as far as he could tell, the first thing he had done in this world that left a mark on it. Everything before had been taken in and smoothed over—the mother he woke, the households he canvassed, the fish he could not save. But this stayed. It was the size of a few more marmots a week. It stayed.
He should have been glad, and mostly he was. He had reached the one person in the camp who would do anything he asked, and turned him a little, toward the thing he was already best at, and the boy had come out the far side better. Khasar had never wanted to know what the counting was for, or why he should miss on purpose, or why he should give up a good morning early. He had done it because his brother said to, and gone back to talking—about a crane, where last winter it had been a fox.
Temüjin sat with the number and release the breath he had been holding for a long time. Because it had worked, and it had been the cheapest thing he had done since he came into this body.
***
Terms
- self-bow — a bow bent from a single stave of wood, with no horn or sinew backing it. What a boy shoots, and what a destitute household can make or trade for. Not the layered composite bow a grown warrior carries, which is another thing entirely and well beyond a family living on roots and marmots.
- the thumb draw — the steppe way of loosing an arrow: the string hooked back on the thumb rather than pulled with the fingers.