Range of Ghosts (12 page)

The dull thump of icy rain against wool was soon replaced by the rattle of pellets on a frozen surface. Temur stood just within, breathing wearily, listening to it fall, until his makeshift lamp began to flicker and he had to sidle past the horses once more to tend it.

He stripped, bundled himself in a dry long wool shirt and counted on work to warm him while he rubbed the mares dry with scraps of blanket. They were steaming by the time he was done, and that was a good sign; they had not taken a chill.

A draft savaged him every time the wind shifted, and even padded with blankets the ground was stony and harsh, but the fragile warmth of the horses and the lamp soon sent tentative fingers through the confined space. Temur had not intended to doze; the lamp needed constant tending, and he worried for the mares. But the warmth and stillness and the endless hiss of ice entombing them within this crack in the mountainside lulled him, so eventually he bundled himself in fleeces and more blankets and slept.

*   *   *

In his dream, Temur rose from his body. It lay on the ground, a shriveled, discarded thing. A rag. He wasn’t dead; although the lamp had died he and the mares both seemed to cast a shallow, silvery light. In that, he could see how the pulse beat in the hollow of his throat and how the livid scar stood out on its pallor. Some self-consciousness made him shuffle his dream-feet clear of his crude mortal body. He stood astride himself, as if in stirrups, standing up in the saddle for a wider horizon.

The mares slept standing and did not stir as he walked past them—
through
them—and through the ice-shielded blanket that closed the door of the impromptu stable. Outside, it was day, by the light, but he could not tell if he stood embanked in a midday mountain fog or if this was the first cold light of morning. Every surface he saw—though he could not see far—was glazed with dull diamond.

The mists blew all around him, so he expected ghosts. But there was nothing—not even suggestive shapes in the fog.

Following an itch he did not fully understand, Temur stepped into the fog. Where his boots should have slipped on the glaze ice, he stood steady, and that too reminded him that he was dreaming. As did the sudden chirp and rise of birdsong—spring and meadow songbirds, not the great Berkut eagles, wolf-killers who haunted the high ranges. Piercing gold rays slanted through the fog, tattering it as swiftly as a sword blade run through silk. Temur raised a hand to shield dazzled eyes, and found himself looking a man in the face.

A man—or perhaps something more.

His moustache trailed black as ink across his chin to drape a scale coat of golden horse hooves, and from his shoulders billowed a cloak as blue as the lapis that had glazed the fountain bowls in Qarash’s center square. He had one hand on the mountainside, one foot stepped up as if into a stirrup, and as Temur watched, he rose up and slung his other leg over the high saddle between peaks as if he straddled a mare.

The mountain seemed to agree with him, because he had no sooner settled himself than it snorted, shook itself loose of the earth, and climbed joyfully into the sky. It lifted its cliff-feet with frolicsome pleasure, kicking out once or twice for the sheer joy of it. Temur flinched, expecting a rockfall to follow, but the mountain-mare’s step was light, and on her back the Eternal Sky gentled her with soft touches.

Of the sixty-four sacred colors of horses, she was the color they called storm, a smoked black with a streaked, sparse mane and tail the color of wind-pulled clouds lit from beneath by a rising sun. Her face was swathed broadly with white between the eyes and nostrils, and those eyes were kind and bright. Her ears pricked into a tall oval crown atop her head. She regarded Temur inquisitively from high above.

Perhaps the Eternal Sky saw her looking, because he turned and stared down at Temur.

“A mouse,” he said. “A little steppe fox. Where did you come from, child?”

“I hid,” Temur said. In his dream, it seemed perfectly reasonable to be speaking all the way up to the sky in a calm, low voice. “From the ice.”

“Of course you did,” the Eternal Sky said, and Temur was struck by how much he seemed like the Great Khagan, Temur’s grandfather for whom he was named—or how the Great Khagan was remembered, anyway. Temur had been too young to know him when the old man had died. “Well, just a moment, then. I have a task to be about.”

As Temur watched, the Eternal Sky reached into his coat of hooves and pulled out a long black veil. He wrapped it about his face in triple layers, all save the eyes, where he only drew one pass. Temur could still make out the brilliance of his black eyes behind. He thought the Eternal Sky winked at him.

Somehow, as the Eternal Sky wrapped his face, it seemed he wrapped the sky behind him as well, because with each pass of the cloth, that lapis color grayed and softened, became violet, became indigo. When the Eternal Sky tucked the ends of his scarf in, he became Mother Night.

Mother Night blew Temur a kiss.

“There,” she said, and her voice was the same voice except it was sweet, a woman’s. “That should do for now.”

She began reaching into her pockets and saddlebags, drawing forth ornaments that chimed and clinked. The night was terribly dark now, without stars or moons, but Temur could see her outlined in the same pale silvery light he cast himself. He watched as she lit lamps with a taper and scattered them about the sky, hanging each one on an invisible hook before grasping the fabric of the night and giving it a pull, skating it along the sky. He watched her hang each lamp, but somehow there were thousands more in the sky every time he looked.

Then, the lanterns lit, she began to hang her sequins—a pendant of silver, a pendant of pearl, a pendant of horn, a pendant of costly pale shell all the way from the foreign seashore. A pendant of electrum, a pendant of diamond, a pendant of iron …

“You hung the moons,” Temur said.

She smiled at him through her veil—or so he thought by the shape of the light behind it. “So I did, child. And this one is yours, is it not?”

“Yes,” Temur said.

“Would you like to see it closer?” She extended her hand, her skin dusty gold, like pollen on a mirror-colored horse’s hide.

Temur’s mouth dried with nervousness.
Does that happen in a dream?

He reached out his hand to Mother Night’s, and felt her fingers, calloused and leather-damp, wrap his own. A strong pull, and he was behind her on the back of the storm-colored mare. The hot scent of horse surrounded him, and the musk of a woman hard at work.

“Hold on,” Mother Night said, and pulled his hands around her waist as the storm-colored mare slapped her tail in delight and broke into a canter. All the sequins on Night’s veil jingled. “We shall go and see it, then.”

The moon was a tiny bangle hung on the fabric of the night. The moon was a sequin that sparkled by Temur’s nose as he leaned over Night’s shoulder. The moon was a great iron-colored disk swelling before them as the storm-colored mare bore them toward it at impossible speed. Her hooves made no sound in the sky; her mane whipped in scant threads as she tossed her head up to scent the wind. They flew as high as a vulture’s gyre, and sooty wings beat all around them.

Then they were falling, curving down to the Iron Moon as if on the descent from a great leap, and the storm-colored mare reached out with her forelegs and caught them. Great puffs of iron-black and rust-red dust rose under her hooves.

Temur caught himself against Night’s back, straightened, and turned to crane his neck each way. “Oh,” he said.

In every direction, a rocky landscape in char-black and rust-red and streaks white as ash stretched away. The horizon curved down, and Temur felt curiously light, curiously free, as if he might float away from the storm-colored mare’s back at any provocation. His fingers clutched on Night’s belt. As the mare cantered, her muscular haunches working behind him, a silvery pall of air surrounded them, trailed them, leaving behind a confetti of minuscule bubbles.

It was broad day here, and the sun gleamed pale in a sky as black as new ice.

“Oh,” he said again.

“Your moon, Temur Khanzadeh,” said Mother Night.

“I’m no prince.…”

*   *   *

… And he awoke, coughing and choking, shaking with fever in the dark and the cold, to hear the stamp of restive horses. The makeshift shelter was utterly dark, and the rattling plink of ice on ice no longer echoed through. Sweat-sour and shaking, Temur heaved himself onto his side. His arms felt like boiled dough; his body, a salt-stained rag. Another wracking cough rattled his lungs like hide dried stiff, filling his mouth with sick-sweet phlegm. In the dark, he groped for a corner to spit it in, doubled over, braced with both hands on rocks while his empty stomach spasmed.

He would have cursed, but he hadn’t the energy. Instead, fortifying himself with shallow, cautious breaths, he straightened bit by bit. Head spinning in a darkness so complete that his eyes provided ghostly images of things that were not there, he managed to push himself upright against the chill, gritty stone. One of the mares whickered curiously—Bansh, by her voice, and close by.

He reached out to her, found her broad, warm shoulder. She was his prop as he edged back again along her side to her haunches until Buldshak’s warm whiskery nose pushed at his cheek. At least the muzzles of horses were dry and satiny, unlike the slick snouts of cattle.

He ran his hand up Buldshak’s forehead to the forelock. She leaned into him, and only the wall kept him from falling back. He was grateful for the darkness: Disorienting as it was, it also kept him from noticing how the world spun.

He edged past Buldshak’s haunches, his boots slipping in half-frozen manure, until his groping hands found the rough, icy wool of the blanket he’d hung for shelter. He stood still for a moment, controlling his breath, waiting for his heart to stop racing from so slight an effort at this. He thought if he started coughing again, he would never stop.

When he pulled the packs aside, the blanket had frozen into the cracks where he’d wedged it, and the whole was saturated and sheathed in ice that rendered it as hard and heavy as an iron door.

Temur wrestled with it until his chest heaved and his legs trembled from exhaustion—a matter of a few moments only. The urge to cough was a fire in his lungs. He leaned against the rock slab, shuddering with cold even though he knew the exertion should have warmed him, and thought.

Hard and heavy as iron, yes. But ice was brittle.

He wished he’d had the foresight to pull Buldshak into the shelter first. Bansh was a warrior, and he did not know the rose-gray mare as well. But she was a steppe pony. Surely, she was trained?

He hated to risk her hooves, but they had to get out of here somehow, and he wasn’t strong enough.

He wormed his way back up to her head, tracing the line of her neck to find her head. He’d left the mares bridled, only slipping their bits, and now he replaced the bit and took hold of the reins just under Buldshak’s whiskery chin. He leaned in against her cheek. She snorted; he felt the heat of her breath across his shoulder.

“Kick,” he said, and reined her back a step.

He felt her plant her forelegs on the rocky earth, felt the shiver of effort run through her. Her head came down, her rear came up, and both hind legs flew into the air. An enormous shattering filled the confined space as she jumped forward again, and only Temur’s hand on her bridle kept her from charging up Bansh’s backside. Buldshak danced, snorting, as light and icy air suddenly flooded their little nest, outlining the mares and the piles of gear in brittle morning brilliance.

The cold hit Temur a dizzying blow, but after two or three breaths his head settled and new strength braced him. When Buldshak settled under his hands, he staggered back. The fresh air was strength, even though it set him coughing again. These were shallower coughs, however, and he managed to stay on his feet.

She’d torn the blanket free at the top and broken much of the ice off it, though the bottom was still frozen to the ground. With effort, wheezing, Temur managed to push it back over itself until it lay more or less flat across the icy ground. He set about checking Buldshak’s hooves and ankles for damage, then backed both mares out into the daylight.

They stepped cautiously on the glassy ground, ice creaking under their weight, ripped veils of steam following the movements of their heads. They stood steadily—Buldshak snorting and shifting her weight, Bansh calm and seemingly half asleep, mottled muzzle dipped toward her one white-splashed foreleg—while Temur ferried their gear out of the rockfall shelter in the largest bundles he could manage, barely avoiding the lake of piss the rose-gray unleashed as soon as he walked away from her head. He had to keep leaning on the wall or a mare’s withers to rest, and when he bent to struggle the door blanket free of the ice, he set off another coughing fit that left him on his hands and knees before it subsided.

By the time he had the mares fed and tacked, their gear loaded, the morning was half gone and the sun had cleared the peaks. This proved a blessing and a nuisance, for the ice rotted almost as soon as the sun touched it—the ground underneath had still been too warm to freeze—but that made for water-slick ice interspersed with patches of mud.

Still, there was no choice but to go on. Temur was sickening, and the mares needed green fodder and clean water.

Buldshak had the smoother gait, but it was into Bansh’s saddle that Temur struggled. The liver-bay was a rock, and she stood like one even though Temur mounted like a toddler, pulling on the saddle and her mane to drag himself across her back, bruising his thigh on the high cantle, thrashing grimly until he got himself seated. She knew he wasn’t well, or so he fancied; normally she was light on the rein or the leg, soft as a cat. But now she ignored his crude attempts to direct her and simply stepped forward, one hoof after the other, in the most cautious of possible walks while Temur huddled in his coat and two wrapped blankets on her back.