Khasar came back a day early and did not put the bow down.
"There's a flock up past the second bend. Big one." He stood in the doorway with the light behind him. "Four hundred, maybe more. I sat and watched it a while."
"You were supposed to be at the marmots."
"I know what I was supposed to be at." He came in and crouched by the fire and held his hands out to it, and did not look up. "Some of the ewes have Father's mark on them."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Temüge stopped what he was doing with the strap.
"How many?"
"I counted forty before they moved off. It's more than forty." Khasar turned his hands over.
"They're old, brother. They're old ewes. Whoever's had them has had them since the year everybody left."
***
Temüjin went outside and stood in the cold with his back to the felt and let his mind work the numbers.
Four springs. A ewe throws one lamb a year and sometimes two, and the lambs throw lambs, and four springs on from forty ewes there is a flock in front of you that is mostly not the original flock.
In the other life this was called interest, and it compounded, and nobody ever had to feed it. Here it was standing in somebody's grass, eating that grass.
Khasar came out after him.
"We go at night," he said. "Two of us. We cut out the marked ones and we're four hours gone before anybody's up."
"And then what?"
"Then we have sheep."
"Then we're the people who came in the dark." Temüjin turned to look at his brother.
"Every camp between here and the mountain hears it inside a month, and after that nobody trades with us, nobody warns us, and the first time anything goes missing anywhere on this river it was us."
Khasar thought about it. He did not argue and he did not agree. "You've got a better one, then."
"No. I've got a worse one that leaves us able to walk into a camp afterwards."
"That's the same answer with more words in it." Nevertheless he went and got the horses.
Their mother was at the fire when they came back for the meat. Hoelun heard the whole of it, and she looked at the two of them, and just added that the near bay was still favoring the fore and they should take the other one.
She did not ask him what he was going to do about it.
She had asked him things once. She no longer did unless it affects the entire household. Temüjin accepted the distance, he knew that was the price from the start.
***
The man's name was Tödöge and he had four sons and a good stretch of the north bank, and he came out to meet them himself before they were properly in.
They were fed, the bowl went round which Temüjin took, drank and set it down. Tödöge asked about what the brothers had seen on the move, and he answered all of it, and neither of them said anything about sheep for a long while.
Two of the sons had come to stand near the fire. The other two were out with the flock and would be in before dark. Temüjin had seen them on the way, and had started calculating while Tödöge was talking about the ice, and by the time the second bowl went round he had a number.
Three hundred and sixty, near enough. Sixty-one of them were old ewes with his father's mark on them. That was every marked animal in the flock, and twenty-one more than Khasar had sat still long enough to see.
He was fairly sure Tödöge did not have a number. There was no reason for him to have one. He knew every animal in that flock by sight. That is better than a number, and it was no use whatever for this.
"You've seen the mark," Tödöge said at last.
Temüjin waited.
"They came in with mine the spring the camp broke up. There was nobody to give them back to." He said it flatly. "I've wintered them four times. I lost eleven of them the second year and I'd have lost the lot if I'd left them where they were."
"I know."
The oldest son said, "The old ones are his."
"The old ones are his," Tödöge agreed. "Nobody's arguing about the old ones."
Four springs of increase out of sixty-one ewes. None of it was marked, all of it fed on his water, and nobody anywhere could dispute that.
He had ridden two days getting ready to make a case. That was the wrong answer. He didn't come there to threaten, but he also didn't come here to beg. He didn't have force for the first action, and it was entirely up to the mercy of the other for the second one.
So Temüjin did not make one.
"How many of them are mine?" he said.
Tödöge blinked. "What?"
"You've fed them four winters and I haven't. You know what that cost and I don't." Temüjin put his hands on his knees. "So you say the number. Whatever you say, I'll take it and go, and I won't come back about it."
Nobody moved.
Tödöge looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked, without meaning to, at his oldest son, and at the second one behind him, and at the last two sons coming down off the slope with the flock strung out behind them.
"A hundred and forty," he said.
It was a good deal more than Temüjin had to say. One of the sons made a small sound but stopped halfway.
"A hundred and forty," Temüjin nodded, and stood up. That was the end of negotiation.
***
They cut them out in the morning, and two of Tödöge's sons worked the flock with them until it was done.
Riding back with a hundred and forty animals moving badly in front of them.
Khasar said, "He'd have given us sixty."
"Sixty was what I rode out for."
"Why'd he do it, then."
"Because I asked him in front of his sons," Temüjin said, "instead of telling him in front of them."
Khasar laughed once, and looked at his brother for slightly longer than was comfortable, and then went up front to keep the ewes off the water.
***
That night he sat by the fire with a flat piece of birch bark and a burnt stick and put down what he had: the sixty-one, the count of what came with them, how many were yearlings and how many were older than that.
He wrote it in the letters of his own century, small, because they were faster and because there was nobody alive who could read them. To anyone leaning over his shoulder it was scratches. Temüge did lean over his shoulder, looked at it for a while, and lost interest immediately.
The thing about a hundred and forty sheep is that you cannot eat them. Rather you should not. He would have to say that unpopular optiona out loud tomorrow. A flock that gets eaten is a good winter and then nothing. A flock that gets kept is four bad years and then a household nobody has to feed.
He knew exactly who should be running the ram, and where the good grass was two ridges over, and which of Tödöge's sons could be got to part with a decent animal in the autumn.
What he did not have was hands to share the burden. He had Khasar, who could put an arrow through a marmot at seventy paces and could not be made to care beyond that. He had Belgütei, who was willing, and also eleven. He had Sochigel, who could work stock better than the rest of them together but had not said a sentence to him since the summer. He had his mother but she still had to manage everything else.
There used to be one who can do these tasks. Temüjin realized small part of the consequences of his actions and sat with that for a while.
Then he put another line on the bark, and banked the fire, and went to sleep.
***
Terms
- **the increase** — everything a flock produces after you acquire it. The animals you started with get old and die and the increase is what makes a flock a living thing. A ewe can carry a household's mark for ten years; her lamb is born carrying nothing at all, and whose it is depends entirely on the two households involved.
- **the mark** — how a household says an animal is its own. It goes on and it stays on the animal.