The horses came down to the wood side every morning because the wind kept the snow thin there, and on the fourth hard morning Bekter took them round to the north end instead. Temüjin walked out to the wood side two days later out of habit and stood a while in the churned old ground before he figured out where everybody was.
The wind had gone round. By the end of that week there was a drift banked up the whole of the wood side to the height of a horse's chest, and the horses were at the north end eating.
He got there himself in the end, standing in it with his face going numb. He got there four days after Bekter had got there.
***
He rode over to the eleven households on the second clear day, on a pretext about a strap.
He had ridden there once before and come home with nothing, and this time he was fed faster, which is what a second visit buys a person. The old man remembered him and was pleased to see his face and wanted to talk about his geldings again.
There were three gers in a row on the good side of that fold and two more set back, and Temüjin had counted them the first time without asking anything, because the first time he had gone with a different question in his mouth.
"Whose is the small one at the end?"
"My second's."
"He has his own fire?"
"His own fire, his own felts, and eleven of my horses." The old man was saying a good thing about himself and pretending to say it about his son, and enjoying both halves. "I put him up four summers ago. His brother the year before that. The one at the back is my sister's boy and he came to me, so he is mine, and he has nine."
"You gave him the horses."
"Who else would?"
It was said comfortably, over a bowl, by a man with no clue of what idea he had planted in Temüjin's head and he carried it home the whole half morning turning it over and finding it good.
***
He had rehearsed the last conversation with Bekter for four days at the wood. This one he did not rehearse at all, and told himself that was because he did not need it.
He put forth his idea to his mother at her fire in the evening with the small ones asleep and Khasar out somewhere in the dark fiddling with a bow. He had the whole dialogue ready. Two gers already stood in this fold. Two fires were already lit separately and put out separately. What's left was to say out loud what was already true, and then Sochigel's ger would be Sochigel's ger, and Bekter would be in charge of that, and this one would be his mother's, and in turn he would be the head of it.
Hoelun let him finish. She always let him finish.
"How many horses?"
"Nine."
"How do they go?"
"Five and four."
"Which four?"
"The two Bekter and Belgütei ride, and the bay, and the one with the split ear."
"Who takes the four out to the far grass in the spring, when Belgütei is at home because he is a child?"
"Bekter."
"And your five, at the same time?"
"Khasar and me."
"And when one of your five goes lame in the spring, with Bekter four days off."
"We'd borrow one of theirs."
"You would borrow of course" she said. Not a question, and not sharply either. She turned a stick in the fire and put it back where it had been.
He heard it. Three seasons among winter neighbours had taught him what the word carried. You rode over and you asked, and they said yes and were pleased to have been asked, and there was no morning afterwards on which anybody could ride back and say they were owed.
"What would be different?" she said.
"Sochigel would have the drying to run herself. She does most of it now and asks you before she does any of it."
"And?"
"Belgütei would have something of his own he was answerable for. He is old enough to be given something and nobody gives him anything."
"He is a child."
"And there would be somebody at this fire who—" He fount himself stopping about half a word in hand and it was louder than the sentence unsaid.
Hoelun did not ask him to finish it. She sat with her hands still and did not answer, and he did not fill the silence, and neither of them ever did. She was weighing what he had said against something in her head and she had never once named it out loud in front of him.
"We do not split," she said.
He should have stopped there. He knew it while he was not doing it.
"It is done in our neighbors. Five fires and one man's sons in three of them. It is not a strange thing to do, it is done half a morning's ride from here, and they have got fewer horses a head than we have."
"That man is alive."
"I know he's alive."
"Then you know what he does." She said it without any weight on it at all. "He puts them up. He gives out the horses and he says which, and everyone else follows because he is standing there and he is their father. There is nobody to put you up. There is nobody to put Bekter up. Whatever we said tonight doesn't matter. We would still be nine people and nine horses in the morning, and the only difference would be that two of us had started calling it something."
He had an answer to that. But the price attached to it was too big to put forward easily.
"You have asked me three times what would be different," Hoelun said, and reached past him for the kettle. "You have not once told me what would be better."
***
Bekter had it from somebody by the middle of the next day and came out to the picket to say so, rather than wait to be told.
"Your mother says you want two households."
"Yes."
"It's not a stupid idea." He got in under the bay's neck to look at something and went on talking from under there. "In the summer it might even work. You'd have the small ones and the roots and the river and I'd have the horses, and neither of us would need much off the other."
"But not now."
He came out and straightened up. "Two of us can hunt. Me and Khasar. Your bow won't throw far enough to matter and Belgütei's a child, so it's the two of us feeding nine. In the snow the food's four days off, so one of us is always gone after it and the other holds the camp. That works for one camp. Split us and each half wants both of us at once, and there's still only the two."
It was true. It was true in the flat, unarguable in the way of nomad, and there was nothing in it to take hold of and be angry about.
"And you'll have your own fire," Bekter said. "When you're grown. I'll put you up myself, if there's anything to put you up with by then, and there might be." He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. "Your mother's not wrong, though. She's never once been wrong about the horses."
"All right," Temüjin said, and that was the end of it.
***
He went out after dark and counted the horses. He did not need to do it except to keep himself occupied.
They were where Bekter had put them, at the north end, black shapes against a paler black, and there were nine of them. Every figure in the argument had been right — his mother's, and Bekter's, and his own. He had gone into it with a case and come out of it having been beaten, and he would have taken the argument apart the same if he had been the one being asked.
That was the part he could say, and he said it to himself twice, and it did not help.
Because the case had never been the point. He had not wanted two households for the drying, or for Belgütei. He had wanted one of them to be his — a fire where what happened was his to say.
And there was no way to ask for that because it would just come out as a boy wanting to take over an older brother for no better reason than that he could not stand the deciding by anyone else. So he had argued drying, and horses, and Belgütei, and lost on all three, because not one of them had been the thing he was after.
In the other life a man who wanted his own house went and got one, and nobody had to grant it to him. Here it took a living man in charge, handing out horses and saying which were whose. There had been one in this household, and he had been dead four years.
What his father left was not an empty seat waiting for somebody to sit in it and decide. There was no seat. His mother could say we do not split all winter and be right every time she said it, and it held only because the fold agreed with her.
He counted them again on the way back, because he was there, and got nine.
***
Terms
- putting up a son — the way a household becomes two. A man with grown sons gives one of them a ger, felts of his own, and a named number of horses out of his herd, and from that day the son's fire is his own and what happens at it is his to say.
- the gelding — a castrated male horse, and a household's riding stock. Mares are kept for their milk and their foals and are not ridden hard. A household short of meat is temporary issue. A household short of geldings cannot move, and on the open steppe a family that cannot move is dead where it stands.