Nobody had said it out loud in two days. Everybody was thinking it since the animals came into the camp, because they had been hungry since the melt.
Then Temüjin said it at the morning fire, standing, because sitting down would have looked like a request.
"We don't eat the ewes."
Qachiun looked up. Temüge stopped chewing.
"Not this winter. Not next winter either. The wethers we can take, and the old ones when they go barren, and that's all. Every ewe that can still breed stays alive until she can't."
"That's most of them," Khasar said.
"Yes. A hundred and nine of them."
"So we've got a hundred and forty sheep and we're still eating marmot."
"Two springs. Then we're not eating marmot, and we won't be ever eating those again."
He had the numbers ready to support his decision — what forty ewes had done for Tödöge in four springs, and what a hundred and forty would do with him in charge. They would never have to sleep hungry. He had been preparing this speech since the ride back.
Hoelun banked the fire and stood up.
"We are eating twenty of them," she said. "Starting with the four that are lame."
Then she went out to the picket.
He stood there with unfinished speech.
She had not asked him anything. That was all that had happened, and he kept wondering why it had gone so badly. She had always asked. What would be different? How many horses is that? Each of those had been an offer for introspection and he welcome those counsels.
Now she had stopped giving open questions. She stated the thing and walked away from it, and there was no gap to put an argument into.
Twenty was more than he wanted to lose and but she had picked the four lame ones first. He would have picked the same four.
He found her at the picket with the near bay's forefoot turned up against her thigh, clawing the dirt out of the sole with her thumb.
"You were right about the four. I'd have taken the same ones."
"I know."
"I'm not here about the sheep." His tone firm, "Say it to me first. Any of it, as hard as you want".
"Then I say what we do, and that's what we do. Not you, mother. Not anymore."
Her hands stopped.
She let the hoof down and stood, and took her time. Temüjin waited.
"You are the man of this ger," she said.
"It's been that way since the summer. I wanted to see how long you'd keep asking me whether you were in charge or not."
"I wasn't—"
"You stood up to say it this morning." She wiped her hands down her front. "A man who has it in control does not stand up."
He did not refute that because it was true.
"When you are wrong I will say so," she said, "and I will say it where others can hear me."
"I'd want that."
"You will not want it." She bent and took the hoof up again. "But you will get it."
She finished the hoof and set it down. Then she went down to the flat and counted the sheep herself.
***
The trouble came two days later, and it was not the food.
"I can't do both," Khasar said. The brothers were up on the rise with the flock spread out below. "I go out four days, I come back, I sleep, I go out again. That's the whole of me. If I'm walking sheep I'm not bringing anything in."
"I know."
"And I want to go further." He said it while looking at the river. "There's country up past the second fold nobody works. Red deer. I've seen the sign twice and both times I was two days short of following it."
Temüjin had not known that. He had been so busy planning for the future that he had not known there was a place his brother wanted to get to.
"How far?"
"Six days. Maybe eight."
"Then go."
Khasar turned round, surprised.
"I wasn't asking permission."
"I know. And I'm telling you the sheep aren't yours to worry about."
So that was Khasar spoken for, and Qachiun was nine, and Temüge and Temülün were smaller than that, and his mother had four days of work in every day already.
Which left the one person in that camp who could do it.
Sochigel had run the drying every autumn. She could put her hand on a ewe's back and tell you what was wrong with it. And she had not spoken to him since the summer.
Not a word, not a look held long enough to strike a conversation. She took what she was handed and she handed back what was finished and she managed every part of it without once addressing him, and he understood it would be this way for years to come.
He could not ask her: a man asking a woman for a favour, and he had killed her son the summer before.
***
He gave the flock to Belgütei instead.
He did it in front of everybody, at the fire, and he did not phrase it as help.
"The sheep are yours. Not to work — to run. You say when they move and where they graze. If I want something done with them I'll come and ask you for it."
Belgütei looked at him with his mouth open.
"I'm eleven."
"You're eleven and you're the only one of us who's never lost an animal. Qachiun will help you. Temüge as well. When he's not carrying water."
The boy went red to the ears and left, and came back a moment later because he had not said anything, and said, "I want the far bend in the autumn," and went out again.
Hoelun sat across the fire with a hide over her knees and watched him hand the flock to an eleven-year-old. She did not tell him if he was wrong or not.
Sochigel was across the camp at her own fire. She did not look up.
She was down on the flat the next morning before Belgütei was.
***
She worked the flock from that morning on, beside her son, and everything Temüjin needed done reached her through the boy and came back the same way.
It worked. Belgütei asked her things and she answered him, and what she knew was better than anything Temüjin had in his head. She knew how old a ewe was by her teeth, whether her udder still worked, whether she was carrying a lamb or just fat.
He recorded what she said on the bark and decided based on it. She never told him which ones to keep, and he never asked her to.
He got what he needed without asking and was content with the system working.
***
Building the flock was slow work, and none of it was clever.
Temüjin kept two ram lambs entire out of the first crop and gelded the others, and the two he kept were not the biggest.
Belgütei stood over them a long time.
"That one's small."
"His mother gave birth twins two years running and fed them both."
"You can't see that in this sheep."
"No. That's why nobody does it."
Belgütei looked at the lamb a while longer. Then he cut the big one.
He kept the ram away from the ewes for weeks after everybody else had let theirs breed, so the lambs would be born onto grass instead of snow. That one cost them the whole of an autumn's arguing and it worked the first spring and nobody argued about it again.
He wrote down how many each ewe gave birth, and whether she fed them all. When the bark had no room left on it to write, he cut another. By the second winter there was a stack of them under the felt at his end of the ger, covered in marks that made Temüge laugh because they looked like bird tracks.
The flock went from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and ninety, and then the second spring put it past two hundred and fifty and he stopped saying the number out loud.
They ate better. Not well — better. Khasar kept hunting marmots just for the skin, and there was one week in the second winter when nobody was hungry at all, and he noticed it because Temüge said something about it and put her hands to her mouth, frightened, as if saying out loud might jinx the family.
***
Late in the second autumn he came down off the rise and heard Sochigel speaking on the flat below him. He had not heard her voice since the summer.
"Not that one. Look at her mouth."
Sochigel, standing with her hand on a ewe's jaw, showing Belgütei something about her teeth. The boy was nearly as tall as she was now. He had a stick under his arm and he was nodding.
Temüjin stopped on the slope, too far off to be part of it.
She went on talking. She named the ewe by the shape of her ear and taught her son how old the ewe was and what it would still be worth in the spring. Belgütei listened to all of it, and neither of them looked up the slope.
He stood there a while and then went round the long way so as not to disturb the moment.
***
Terms
- wether — a male lamb that has been castrated. Almost all of them are: one uncut ram can breed with far more ewes than a household's flock needs, so only two or three are kept intact. A wether puts his growth into meat instead.