Temüjin then thought of another idea.
If Bekter went to another camp to serve for his wife, the household lost the man who rode out four days and came back with meat on a horse. Temüjin had spent a month finding solutions and found four answers, each one shorter than the last: Khasar was fourteen months off being able to do it and could be pushed; Qachiun could hold the near work by autumn; two winters of thinner eating was a price and he could say what the price bought; and the fourth was that a household of nine with two boys coming of age was enough.
He went over the four reasons over spring while they moved, walking beside the lead cart.
***
They came down off the high ground on the fifth day and found another household already at the ford, unloaded, with three carts drawn up and the felts off one of them airing over a line.
His people were the Jalair, the man said. His own name was Toghan. He had a wife, a mother, two sons who were still small, and three daughters, and the eldest of the daughters was fifteen. She was seen her sleeves pushed up to the elbow and was fixing a cart axle with her back to all of them.
They ate together, both households at one fire as it was tradition for host and guest families. Hoelun and the man's wife got on immediately, trading at once who had wintered where and what the grass had done there, and Temülün was carried off by the small ones almost before the bowls were down.
And Bekter, who had not been told anything and had no idea he was being put up for 'sale', was Bekter.
He got the far cart across the ford without anyone's help. Its off wheel had been wagging since the top of the slope. The axle was worn thin under the hub and dry, and such wheel usually finds the deep hole in a ford bottom and puts the cart on its side. He had seen it wagging a mile back, and was at that wheel before the water, a shoulder under the frame. When the off wheel dropped into the hole he took the weight, and the cart came over clean. When the man's mother wanted to sit, he moved the saddle she was going to sit on and put a felt over it first, and did it without looking as though he had noticed himself doing it.
By the middle of the afternoon Toghan had begun addressing his remarks to Bekter. Temüjin had come out of the winter knowing it would happen and had counted on it happening.
***
It was the man who opened it, which Temüjin had prayed he would.
He did it in the proper way, sideways and pleasantly, so that nothing would have to be refused. He said that they would be on the eastern side of the range through the summer. He said his eldest was fifteen and it was foolish of a father to keep a daughter as if she would always be there.
Toghan said there was work in his camp for a young man who could see what a cart was going to do before it did it, and that a young man who came to him would eat as his sons ate, and be taught, and not be worked into the ground, and he could name four households who would say so.
Quda, he said, half laughing, testing the shape of it out loud.
Temüjin sat very still on the door side and did not let one thing show on his face, and inside he was going through his mind palace like a man reading a page he has read before.
Because he had. He knew this. He knew it out of a book he had read in another life and it was the same custom he was a part of, four years ago, that his good father set him up. A man rides out. He sees the daughter. The man and the father exchanges about asking and giving, and a spare horse handed over as a pledge and the boy stays behind. It takes just an afternoon and It has been that way for four hundred years.
There was even a spare horse. It was tied forty paces away, eating.
Toghan finished what he was saying, and set his bowl down, and turned.
He turned. Now that he had finished his pitch, someone needed to decide. He looked across the fire to where the answer had to come from, and there was no one sitting there.
***
Nobody had ever sat there for four years.
Toghan's eyes went along the ger, looking for somebody he had not yet been introduced to. They passed over Hoelun. There was no slight in it, he had been talking to her all afternoon and liked her. But a woman in a household could not decide this issue.
He was not embarrassed. He was working it out, and it did not take him long, and when he had it he was sorry.
"Ah," he said.
Nobody said anything.
"I would take him tomorrow," Toghan said. He said it to Hoelun — courteous, and useless, and he knew it was both. "You understand me. I'd take him and be glad of it."
She held his look and did not answer.
"Who would I take him from?"
And there it was, out in the open in five words, and not one person in that ger thought the man had said anything unkind, because he had not. He had asked the only question there was. Quda is not a thing a man is on his own. It is what two of them are to each other, and there is no version of it with one, and no shorter version, and nothing that will stand in for the missing half — not a mother, not the boy himself, not goodwill, not four households who would say so.
Toghan looked into his bowl for a while. Then he said, kindly, that the grass on the east side had come up late this year, and Hoelun said that it had come up late everywhere, and the conversation was over.
***
They rode on in the morning. Hoelun said nothing about any of it until the middle of the day.
"It was a good house," she said, to the country in general. "The mother was sound and the girl works."
That was all. She had known from the moment the man turned his head. She had probably known before that, sitting there watching a stranger warm to her stepson. And she had let it happen and let him find out.
He thought about what went wrong, looking for the place he could have changed it, and there was none.
It was not that anyone had said no. Nobody had said no. Toghan wanted it. Bekter would have gone and he would make no fuss about being sent off. The girl's family were sound and the girl worked and there was a spare horse standing nearby with nothing to do. Every single part of the puzzle had been there in that ger, and the whole thing had failed on the fact that Yesügei had drunk from the wrong bowl on a road four years ago.
And the other thing he had put off thinking reared its head. Bekter was the biggest male in a ger that had no grown man in it; with him gone east to a wife, the biggest male left was Temüjin. The same afternoon that found his brother a household would have made him the head of his own. He had known that all spring, the whole time he was praying any of his methods be successful. He did not want to use the last resort.
***
He was no good that evening and everybody could see he was no good, and one of them did something about it.
Khasar came and sat down next to him close, half his weight coming onto Temüjin's shoulder. He took out a strip of dried meat from inside his coat, where it had been all day, and put it on Temüjin's knee.
"You didn't eat."
"I ate."
"You didn't." He said it comfortably, as a matter of fact, and did not argue about it, and did not go away. He had decided at some point in the afternoon that his brother was ill, and had come to the wrong conclusion, and had acted on it without thinking much.
Then he wanted to know whether the Jalair man's bow was as good as it looked, and whether a stave that colour meant anything, and whether Temüjin had got a look at the string. He wanted to know all of that quite badly. He talked about it for some while.
He did not ask what had happened in the ger. He was the only person in the camp who had been there and had been oblivious the whole time, and it would not have occurred to him to ask.
Temüjin sat with the meat on his knee and his brother's shoulder against his and let the questions about the bow go over him, and did not trust himself to answer any of them for a while.
***
Terms
- quda — what the two fathers of a betrothed pair become to each other: allies, in-laws, and a standing obligation between two camps that outlives the marriage that made it.
- the pledge horse — the horse handed over when a betrothal is concluded, tied and led away in front of witnesses. It is not a payment; the boy's years of service are the payment.
- the Jalair — one of the Mongol peoples of the Onon and Kerulen country.