Range of Ghosts (6 page)

Normally, at the end of the winter season, before moving up to their summer range, the Qersnyk would harrow under the last year’s straw and plant grains and root vegetables in the fields to grow through summer so they could be harvested when the clans returned. This year, there had been no planting, and the ground that now grew green and soft underfoot had been frozen too hard to turn before they were driven from it—which meant famine, come autumn.

But they would worry about that when they were in the mountains alive. For now, the challenge was not dying on the high steppe, bereft of ten-elevenths of their animals and adequate food for the journey.

One sunrise in the second or third hand of days of Temur’s travel with the Tsareg clan, Edene rode up to Temur on that leggy rose-gray filly of hers, the one whose mane was so sparse it did nothing to soften the long stark line of her neck.

“May I ride with you?” she asked, as he finished securing his gear around Bansh’s saddle and tramping the last embers into the wet earth.

This time, she did not cup her hands across her cheeks in embarrassment. She kept her eyes down, demure, and he glanced away to show respect.

He knew he should say no. He should say,
I am a man of no clan.
He should say,
I have no name to give you.

He should do those things, but he was not strong enough to send her away. He said, teasing, “Do you think you can keep up?”

She grinned, teeth flashing white, and had turned her mare and urged her into flight before he had his leg over Bansh’s rump.

The rose-gray filly could run. Temur got a good look at her dappled flanks as she kicked off, her pale belly flashing between dark legs as she alternately dug in and stretched out. Bansh didn’t need his urging to follow. Temur’s off-side foot was barely in the stirrup when she lunged forward, stretching against the reins, her hooves drumming a sharp and aggressive tattoo. He’d never asked her for this before, and it was probably irresponsible to run her now, after forty days of toil and poor diet.

But once he got himself settled and thought about taking up the reins, she had fallen into her stride and shook her head irritably at his interference.

She meant to catch that filly.

Edene rode like a burr stuck in her mane. Like a fat-cheeked manul cat clinging to the back of its prey. Temur heard her shrieking laughter, saw the flicker of the rose-gray’s silver ears as she listened to her rider and to Bansh’s hoofbeats. The liver-bay dug down deep and found the speed to creep up, span by span. Thundering hooves showered clods of muddy grass on the earth behind. Bansh’s head bobbed low, her great shoulders rolling as she surged along in the wake of the taller gray.

They passed sleepy flocks, just beginning to move out with their dogs and tenders for the morning. They passed carts in the process of loading, and a few bands of mares guarded by wary men. So few horses left; so few of the sixty-four sacred colors of horses represented. Temur hoped that most of the bands had scattered on the steppe or been collected by Qori Buqa’s men, rather than being cut down in their blood. He would rather see the horses wild or in his enemy’s hands than dead.

As if responding to his distress, Bansh threw herself forward with ever-greater speed. Temur felt her gather and extend, the rocking motion, the way her body swelled and shrank around each tremendous breath. She moved, and he moved with her, then they were beyond the edge of the refugee train and running, still running, while the grassland rolled away under them as endless as a tax assessor’s scroll.

Slowly, Bansh ate up the rose-gray’s lead. Slowly, she drew up beside her, her breath trailing in smoky plumes through the morning chill, her mottled nose reaching the rose-gray’s flank, her cinch, her shoulder. As he came up on Edene, he saw her turn to check under her arm for his position. He saw her lips moving as she chanted to her mare—swiftness songs, or songs of soundness, he did not know.

He had nothing to say to Bansh. She was flying; she was giving everything to the race, and it would be unfair to ask for more. The world whipped by. Stride by stride, the rose-gray’s lead failed her. Stride by stride, Bansh came on.

Edene’s rose-gray was one of the best sprinters Temur had seen.

But Bansh, he began to realize, was an immortal.

At two
yart
—Temur estimated—the mares ran neck and neck. At two
yart
and forty
ayl,
their black-and-pink noses bobbed side-by side.

Another forty
ayl,
and the rose-gray folded. She broke stride, snorted, tossed her head. Gamely, she surged forward again, but Temur saw her rally only because he glanced back through his armpit to see her. To see her fighting the reins as Edene restrained her gently, turning her in a broad circle so she dropped into a canter, then a snorting, blowing trot, kicking out at tussocks and still protesting her rider’s counsel.

Temur settled his weight back, and Bansh too dropped into a canter. He brought her around, aware of the spring in her gait, the lightness of her motion. Having beaten the rose-gray, she was willing to stop. But she wanted him to know she wasn’t finished yet, if he still cared to run.

He stroked a hand down the sweaty length of her neck, brushing away the lather where it had collected beneath the reins. He shook her sweat from his fingers and wiped his palm on his trousers as Bansh brought him up beside the now-walking rose-gray.

“Is she all right?”

Edene nodded. Her face glowed with the wind and excitement, almost as bright as the iridescent shimmer of her mare. “Buldshak is of the line of the varnish-colored mare Temurbataar. She does not
get
beaten. What a horse that is! What is her line?”

“I don’t know,” Temur said, smoothing down her mane once more. “She found me on the battlefield. I don’t know her line.”

Bansh reached, teeth bared ostentatiously, for Buldshak’s neck, and he leaned down to tap her cheek. She backed off, making a performance of shaking her head. “Clown,” he called her.

She snorted and danced a step.

Edene was looking at him, hands folded on the pommel, eyes half lidded. When he returned the glance, she turned away and looked down. “Temur—”

He drew a breath. He had to say this now, before she made herself embarrassed.

“Edene.”

She met his gaze, eyes wide, and swallowed her words.

“I have no clan,” he said. “I have no one to tell my name. If you want that of me—”

Her eyes widened with pity, which wasn’t what he wanted. But then she schooled herself and grinned. Her voice was strained, but she made it come out light anyway. “I don’t need to marry you,” she said. “What if we were just friends?”

*   *   *

Al-Sepehr reclined across cushions before the shaded windows of Ala-Din’s stoutest tower, listening to his youngest wife read aloud from a book of histories purported to have been written by the hand of the ancient Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d himself. The door to the hall had been left slightly ajar on purpose, and another of his wives—older and white-eyed with cataracts—sat beyond, her hands occupied with her stitching.

Al-Sepehr heard her stir as someone came up, and two women’s voices speaking in low tones. He held up a hand for the youngest wife to cease reading and found his feet. A moment later, the door swung open and Saadet entered—as slender as her twin, but not so tall. Being a woman, she was not clad in the indigo sash and veil of the Nameless, and while she carried an unseemly long knife—in case she should need to use her brother’s combat training—she did not go so far as to offend the Scholar-God by handling a sword.

“Al-Sepehr,” she said, lowering herself to the floor.

“Stand,” he said, extending his hand to her. His youngest wife snapped the book shut—al-Sepehr made a note to speak to her about respect for ancient objects—and exited the room hastily, tripping over the rug edge on her way.

Saadet rose without his assistance, holding the ivory silk of her veil across her nose and mouth with one hand. “My brother has reached Qori Buqa,” she said. “He has with him a dozen mercenaries dressed in indigo, and Qori Buqa has made him welcome. He says to tell you that he will be among the pagan dead tomorrow.”

“That is good,” al-Sepehr said. “You may go, and tell Shahruz to contact me directly when he has reached the battlefield.”

She bowed again, though this time not so floor-scrapingly, and retreated through the door. “Close it,” al-Sepehr said.

She pulled it silently to behind her, before either of his wives could reenter the room. Al-Sepehr stood for a moment and watched the empty space before he allowed a frown to crease the corners of his mouth.

His chambers were simple for a man who claimed the title al-Sepehr. A bed, the cushions, a low couch or two. The shelves that held boxes, and books, and small trinkets—but not too many. He thought better if he kept his space and his head free of clutter.

But toward the rear of the chamber there was one thing that stood out. A heavy stone table hung suspended from the ceiling-beams on iron chains, insulated on every side by air. Al-Sepehr crossed to it, measuring his footsteps, and looked down at the single thing it supported.

A book. Or what could have been the ghost of a book, perhaps—its covers translucent gray, marked with letters white as bone; its binding rings silver; and every transparent page within etched with the gorgeous serpentine cursive letters and diamond-shaped accents of the dialect of ancient Erem.

The glass covers chimed softly as al-Sepehr drew on a kidskin glove and opened them with infinite care. Some of the page edges were chipped, and he was too well acquainted with the illness that followed when he let this dire old thing taste his blood. One by one, he turned the crystal leaves, watching as transparent letters cut in transparent pages caught the sunlight.

Every word twisted in his head and made his eyes ache and burn. He found the page he wanted and settled down to study the spell inscribed therein.

To raise the enemy’s dead and bind them to your bidding,
he read, in a book that had been ancient, a language that had been dead, when the founder of al-Sepehr’s order—Sepehr al-Rach
ī
d—first unearthed it from the tombs of a crumbled city and spoke its phrases aloud.

*   *   *

Temur was awake still at sunset, checking his mare’s legs, bribing her with the last of the mutton-fat sweets. He worried for her condition, on the spare diet of wintered-over hay and first spring shoots of grass, when they had so far to go. Bansh was steppe-bred, and now that she was properly groomed, even by starlight the bay hide stretched over her long muscles and prominent bones showed the characteristic pearly glow of her ancestry. The steppe horses were legendary for it; in sunlight, they gleamed like hammered metal, like jewels, like mirrors, in shades of silver or brass or pearl or steel no animal should reflect. There were legends of how they came by those colors, but Temur thought it was probably some trick of the shape of the hair shaft. Not all the steppe horses exhibited it, and it never endured in preserved hides.

Temur hobbled Bansh loosely while she lipped his shoulder, hoping for more sweets. The smell of honey, cinnamon, and grain clung about her breath, laced with the slightly rancid mutton fat. Temur’s stomach grumbled; his marmot supper, stewed with coals inside a bag sewn of its own skin, had been long ago and fairly insubstantial once divided with Edene and her seven-year-old brother.

He had pitched his bedroll some distance from the Tsareg tents. Now he stood in the cool calm and the firelight, watching the stars prickle out across the darkening veil. They faded away in the still-lit west, their light the silver and pale gold of ghost-colored horses.

Slowly, methodically, Temur brushed Bansh’s hide and combed out her mane and tail until she gleamed like a horn bow in the firelight. The long slice along her ribs had healed completely, with no sign of proud flesh—unlike the distended, livid scar that bulged across his own neck—but the new hair was coming in white across the scar.

He heard the footsteps behind him. And this time he did not reach for his knife, because he knew them well.

He tossed the brush and the wide-toothed wooden comb towards his saddlebags and turned. “Edene—”

She wore a long white shirt that closed up the front over trews of rough, undyed wool. Her hair was down over her shoulders, combed out and oiled smooth. In the firelight, it gleamed with almost the luster and depth of a steppe mare’s. “Hush,” she said. “I said we could still be friends.”

She stepped up close, her face tucked into the curve of his shoulder, her warm breath bathing his neck. When she leaned forward, her hair made a drape all around her face and shoulders; she smelled of civet and sandalwood and vetiver, rare treasures from the reaches of the empire. The Tsareg clan had indeed come away from ruin with certain of their riches intact.

Her fingers slid under his coat and under his tunic, gliding over flesh that shivered at her touch as if her hands were the hands of the rain.

Temur closed his eyes. He placed his hands upon her hair. The warm curves of her ears filled his palms. He knew what to do, of course. He’d grown up surrounded by it. But knowing what to do and knowing how to go about it to her satisfaction were different things indeed.

His heart raced so loudly in his ears that he barely heard his own voice. “I haven’t done this.”

“You’re no beardless boy,” she said. She looked up at him, her eyes huge and black, and pressed a finger to his lower lip.

“I’ve been ten years in war camps,” he said, and saw her doing the sums in her head. “I could have gone to camp followers or captive women.…” He shrugged. Some did, some didn’t. But his own mother Ashra was a captive, one lucky enough to be taken as one of Otgonbayar Khanzadeh’s wives, and every time he looked at the captive women, he’d seen her.

Edene’s lips curved. “I like you more for what you’ve not done, then.” Her one arm slipped around his waist—still under the tunic—and her other hand emerged to take his and slide it down across her face. She brushed his knuckles with her lips in passing. “Come on. I’ll show you.”