Range of Ghosts (3 page)

“I haven’t got any,” he said. “If I had, I would have eaten it.”

She still looked at him expectantly, turning her head aside the better to see him out of one egg-sized eye. He scowled, then when she would not stop staring, he glanced around at the dead. “What am I saying? We can find you all the sweets you want, dumpling, can’t we?”

*   *   *

Sweets—seeds pounded with honey and mutton fat—reins, a saddlebag’s worth of clothing that wasn’t soaked in blood or piss: All this and more—food, a cooking pot, spare bowstrings, and fresh arrows, though their weights and shaft lengths varied, so he hoped he would not be shooting for prizes before he had a chance to learn the peculiarities of each. He also found a hoof pick and a brush, a bow that wasn’t notched to uselessness, and an iron hatchet. He kept the blankets and fleeces he’d salvaged the night before, rolling them as tightly as he could one-handed. He improvised a sling for the left arm, because the weight of it dragged at his wound and pulled the edges open. Better to go easy and be one-handed for a while than to compound his injury, he thought, though it was harder to apply the wisdom to himself than it would have been to a mount.

He kept calling the mare “Dumpling”—
Bansh
—and soon it became obvious that she had accepted it as her name. She pricked her ears every time he said it. She had wounds, too, which he found when he brushed the blood and grime from her sides. A long shallow slash across her ribs was the worst of it. The blow could have split her open, and Temur flinched in retroactive sympathy as he cleaned it. Her girth or her master’s leg was all that had saved her.

She let him tend it, though, and begged for more mutton-fat sweets when he was done. She pushed her soft, mottled nose into his pockets and licked his quilted trousers while he worked, and he hadn’t the heart to shove her head away. He sang to her—the clean-healing song and the sound-feet song—and she pricked her ears and huffed sweet breath across his mouth.

They might have been the only two things living for a hundred
yart,
except the carrion beasts.

When Bansh was clean, Temur picketed her in the least devastated grass he could find and went to butcher another horse. The livers were no good now, after a night and a day and a half, but in the cold the meat hadn’t turned yet, and he took as much of a haunch as he could eat before it went bad. He wrapped it well in oiled hides so the smell wouldn’t bother the mare, then he tied it on behind her saddle.

Mounting one-handed, weak as he was, was no mean feat, and Temur considered himself lucky that Bansh stood for him as sturdily as a practice block. He was glad his grandfather Temusan couldn’t see him as he hauled himself into one iron stirrup, belly down across the saddle. With sharp agony pulling at his neck and shoulder, he struggled upright, stepped through the gap between the pommel and cantle, and found the other stirrup before the mare moved off.

She stayed to a walk, picking her way among the stinking bodies, ears moving unhappily as her head swung from one side to another. It was just as well, Temur thought; he wasn’t sure he could sit a trot without falling, and if he fell he was sure to reopen his wound. While many a Qersnyk warrior died in a tumble from horseback—the Great Khagan himself had been killed so, leading an army at the age of eighty-two—Temur couldn’t bear the irony of doing it now.

So he let the mare have her head, guiding her only in that he kept them pointed toward the south, where the Range of Ghosts was not yet even a smoky purple smudge on the horizon.

*   *   *

Another night passed before they left the dead behind, and by then they had begun to overtake the living. Temur had not been alone in his determination to reach the mountains. A straggling, numb, war-shocked column of refugees struggled south, moving like migrating birds—each individual but all of one goal, so the whole assembly gave the illusion of unity. In numbers, at least, there was some semblance of safety from the predators that stalked their margins—wolves and the massive steppe lion—waiting for twilight when the archers of the defenders would have to seek their targets half blind.

At first he feared he might be recognized—by warriors or by the women and children hauling their salvaged goods in carts. But either they did not know him or they were too focused on the business of survival to care, or perhaps some were of the faction that would have preferred his brother Qulan to Qori Buqa. So he and Bansh moved among them untroubled.

The vultures stayed with them. Most of the refugees were wounded or exhausted, and when they fell, the sacred birds would dine on their flesh and carry their spirits into the Eternal Sky.

Temur mourned his brother and lost track of the days. He should have fought on in Qulan’s stead. He should have rallied the men.…

Except that was foolish. He might have spent half his life in army camps, but he was barely a man, and Qulan had been older and experienced. Qulan, Temur thought, would have known what to do. Temur could just get more people killed.

Temur had no sense of time passing, except in watching the slow attrition of the moons, the heavier darkness each night as the Eternal Sky noted the passing of another of his uncles or cousins. The days passed in hands with little variation, except that food became scarcer and scantier. Short rations impeded his healing, but eventually his wound scabbed and granulated, though he could tell from touching it that it would remain terrible to the sight for as long as he lived. The scar stiffened, making it difficult to turn his head to the right.

Each day he and Bansh moved until they could move no longer, and each evening he slept while she grazed, until moonrise brightened the night and they could move again. They rested again between moonset and morning. In summer, they would have conserved water by sleeping away the high heat of the day, but in winter the refugees kept moving—which meant less sleep and less rest for everyone.

The steppe stretched away on every side, trackless and unfeatured, spotted with the shapes of walking or riding men, of women with oxen pulling their carts, of boys and girls with no more than four summers riding scout.

His people. The Khaganate might have fallen, or Qori Buqa might be gathering his scattered allies and consolidating power. News was fragmentary and not easy to come by. But the Qersnyk people endured, as they always had. As they would whether there was to be a succession or whether the empire would crumble back into the scattered tribes and clans it had been before the Great Khagan conquered the world in every direction as far as a horse could run.

Whatever became of them, Temur thought, they were his people. His brothers and sisters. And he owed to them any hope of survival he could find.

The army of refugees swelled around him. After a few nights, there were songs by the dry-dung fires—and ceremonies to commend the inevitable dead to the Eternal Sky. After a hand of days or so, Temur took up his new bow to bring food back to those fires—marmots, mostly, and the odd
zeren
gazelle, because he could not range widely enough or draw the bow strongly enough to bring down larger game. But whatever he brought was accepted gratefully, and in return the others shared with him what they had—dumplings, clarified mutton fat, salted butter,
airag
—fermented mare’s milk—from the bags that hung over the flanks of the cattle when the herds were on the move.

Those sheep and horses, the goats and oxen among the refugees were too precious to slaughter for food. They would be the foundation of the herds that meant next winter’s survival.

Temur was welcomed there, and he was relieved that when he failed to provide his clan name, no one inquired as to his family. That kind of reticence would have been a rare thing among his people before the fall of Qarash, for the steppe folk navigated their world through a complex and comforting system of clan and family allegiances.

But in the refugee caravan, no one spoke uninvited of clan or family outside—or the allegiances that had brought them all here. The potential that a new friend should prove an old enemy was more than anyone could bear.

*   *   *

The days warmed, which was both good—the greening grass would help feed hungry livestock—and bad, in that one could no longer sweep up snow to boil for water, but must ration one’s self between the shallow lakes that dotted the steppe. One morning four hands of days after the fall of Qarash, Temur roused himself in the long gray gloaming. He stood out of dew-damp bedclothes and pulled on the boots he’d tucked under a corner of the horsehide to keep them dry. Bansh cropped grass nearby. She’d grown leaner, as had Temur.

He offered her dried slices of persimmon as a bribe to slip the bit between her teeth; she lipped them up, whiskers brushing his palm, and stood patiently while he tacked her and rolled up his bedding. He was securing the bedroll behind his saddle when the
shush
and
thump
of hooves across steppe grass drew his attention.

He might have reached for his knife, but whoever rode toward him was making no attempt at stealth.

He looked up to see a girl about his own age, seventeen or eighteen winters behind her, seated astride a rangy rose-gray filly with the long ears and sparse mane of steppe blood. The young horse curvetted, snorting—showing off—and Bansh flicked her own ears as if to show herself unimpressed by the strenuous affectations of youth. The girl’s nervousness, Temur judged, was communicating itself to her mount.

She was old to be unmarried and still riding astride rather than proudly in possession of her own cart and household. But not every married woman gave up horses, especially not when there was a need for swift travel.

“Hail,” the girl said. “Are you Temur?” Long black hair, braided into ropes, protruded from under the wings of her hood. She was plump under her quilted breeches despite the rigors of travel, sloe-eyed, small-nosed between broad sweeps of cheek. Pretty.

Temur put a hand on Bansh’s shoulder and felt the liver-bay mare lean into it. He thought of the moons falling out of the sky every few days. He could be in Bansh’s saddle in an instant if he must. But it was just a girl, and she had not asked his clan. Just his given name.

He opened his mouth to answer and was struck by a sudden wave of grief. He was alone. Whatever family he had left might as cheerfully kill him as welcome him. And if his mother was dead, there was no one alive to speak his true name when he died, no one to whisper it to his wife when he married, no one to speak it in the ears of his mares so they might find him anywhere.

He was alone. He swallowed and said, “I am.”

“I’m Tsareg Edene.”
She
gave up her clan name without a thought. It was a good name, old and honorable, of a clan not prone to getting into other people’s fights. She looked down, pressing a palm flat against one of the broad cheeks that might have been inflamed with embarrassment.

Temur strove to make it easier on her. He kept his gaze down, on her mare’s fine-tipped silver ears rather than on the girl herself. The young horse was striking; she would eventually fade to the blistering, iridescent silver that gray steppe horses obtained, but for now she was the color of snow underneath and up the sides of her body, her head the color of new-hammered silver, her flanks and shoulders bright copper decorated with scalloped dapples of reddish silver.

The horse returned his examination boldly. The girl might not be accustomed to talking to strangers, but she was too stubborn to let modesty silence her. “My grandmother’s mother, Tsareg Altantsetseg, wishes to know if you will eat with us. She boiled a lamb overnight.”

Temur hesitated. Breakfasting on lamb in this time of need was near unto an offer of adoption, and he knew what brought it on—men of fighting and marrying age were scarce among the refugees. He’d heard of Tsareg Altantsetseg: She was a good part of the reason for her clan’s reputation for reserve and good sense. If she was seeking his favor in order to protect her daughters—well, it did not mean she knew his former family. It meant only that he’d made a good display of himself among the refugee band, and she knew he was a strong provider.

And she’d sent a pretty, marriageable girl to make the offer, which was a coded message as well. Or would be, until he had to tell her that there was no one to share his true name with her, or with any potential wife.

Bansh nudged him impatiently.

“I will come,” he said, and swung into the saddle, seating both feet in the iron stirrups. He let the reins hang casually and chirruped to Bansh as Edene swung her own mare around.

It was a brief ride, brief enough so Temur understood that Edene had only ridden for the confidence of speaking from horseback. When she showed him where to dismount and picket Bansh, he held his tongue. There was no good in pointing out to someone that you had noticed their insecurities. Instead, he gave his mare an extra rub across the poll and followed Edene toward the fire.

Most of the refugees had lost their clans and families, though a surprising number reunited on the road, and this seemed to be one of them. The clan hadn’t set up a white-house, but there were two or three skin tents in evidence and more than one cart. A fire licked across coals in the center of the little grouping, and the same light breeze blew skeins of a late snow through tramped grass. A woman sat bundled in skins before the fire, surrounded by younger women and a few boys. Edene led Temur directly toward her.

Tsareg Altantsetseg was diminutive with age, her face like an apple doll’s. The horsehides and sheepskins that wrapped her made her seem even more doll-like, while the crabbed hands that stirred the fire or ladled broth from the cauldron over it could have been dry black sticks.

Sticks were never so deft, though. As Temur and Edene approached, she first dished out bowls of milky tea and
airag,
the lightly fermented mare’s milk that would not make your bowels sick, as fresh mare’s milk was wont. By the time they had made an obeisance—deeper in Edene’s case than Temur’s—the tea was joined by bowls of broth.