Range of Ghosts (7 page)

*   *   *

Temur’s mother Ashra was the daughter of an Aezin prince, bartered in marriage for politics once already, before the Qersnyk khans had claimed her from her Uthman husband. She had gone to Otgonbayar Khanzadeh as his third wife, and she had borne him only one son that lived—Temur, who had grown up surrounded nevertheless by his father’s other children, even after his father died.

Ashra had taught Temur all sorts of things. One was that she thought herself lucky to have come to Qarash, for before that she had been a captive in the women’s quarters of an Uthman household, and the women in the Uthman Caliphate went veiled and shrouded and lived as the property of men, secreted away in female quarters where they saw none but their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, their sons. This was done out of respect for them as living incarnations of the Uthman Scholar-God and Her Prophet, Ysmat of the Beads, Ashra had said.

They could have professions—they could be scientists or physicians, historians or mathematicians, in honor of the Scholar-God and Her Prophet. But learning did not free them to walk in the air. Ashra herself had been raised to the Scholar-God’s religion, but her Aezin father practiced it differently. Ashra had chafed under veils.

And in the Qersnyk lands women rode free; they owned white-houses and all the livestock (except horses—though women might ride, horses belonged to men and men milked and maintained them, unless there were no adult men in a family); they could divorce their husbands; and no one cared in whose bed they lay until they married. And sometimes not even then.

And so when Edene led Temur to his bed and drew him down upon it, there was no one to say her nay. By the fires of her clan, an
ayl
or so off, children cried and women sang; pots clattered; the cracked voice of Altantsetseg rose above the din. Someone took up a working song and other voices joined.

She slipped the toggles on his coat, opened his belt, and put it aside. She unlaced the collar of his shirt and made him raise his arms over his head so she could pull it off. She placed his knife neatly beside the bed, and she untied the wrap of his trousers and drew those, also, down.

And then, as he reclined upon the scratchy wools and the fleeces, she knelt over him and slipped the knots from the loops that held her shirt closed. She let the wide sleeves slip down her arms and showed him her breasts. She hooked the trousers down, and the light of the rising moons silvered her belly and thighs and laid mysterious shadows across the alluvial fan of her sex. Those same shadows cupped her breasts, stroked her throat, and defined the line of her jaw. Temur wanted to reach in and trace them with his hands.

Temur’s breath quickened, first, then became strong and deep. The night air cooled his flesh. When he reached out a hand and laid it against Edene’s arm, he felt the tiny prickles as her skin tensed around fine hairs. She covered his hand with her own, calloused fingertips scraping, and drew it across her breast so his thumb grazed her nipple.

“It is permitted to touch,” she said with a ghostly smile.

So he did.

Her hands drew swaths of warmth against him; her mouth, arcs of fire that burned then chilled. She pressed him against the blankets, her skin smooth against his chest. Wool scratched his shoulders pleasantly. She threw one round, soft thigh across his hips so he gasped aloud when the rough wetness of her sex brushed the underside of his. She reached between them and grasped his shaft, and he did more than gasp: He arched to the touch, bearing her weight up. From the Tsareg fire, there was a burst of conversation, but Temur couldn’t care. What could they see, anyway, looking from the glow of embers into the dark?

“You are the stars,” he said to her, words from an old tale to make her smile.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said, and grinned as she lifted his sex in her hand and glided down to envelop it.

She smiled at the intake of his breath, long and ragged, and the soft moan that followed. She was …

She was honeyed silk and heat and horsewoman’s strength as she rocked against him and rose up on the old-ivory pillars of her thighs and brought herself down again. She was softness, lush dimpled softness of arms and flanks wrapped around strength, like a bent bow. She was the fall of cool hair across his throat and his burning face, like water to a man sick with sun. She was the smell of sweat and pungent oils. She was the warmth of the night, and seventeen moons rose over her shoulders while she rode him with the same purpose and intensity with which she raced her mare.

Temur grasped those shoulders in both hands. She lifted her breast to his mouth, the long nipple pointed and salty between his lips. He suckled like a babe. She took his hand in hers and pressed it between them, showed him where to touch and how. Her head stretched back, her face a mask of concentration. Her thighs slipped in the sweat of his body when she moved. He felt her body tense in ripples.…

One moon in the sky behind her flared briefly white, brilliant enough to wash the whole of the Veil of Night in blue, then flickered dark as a mirror that reflected nothing. It was the Feather Moon of his cousin Mongke, named after Mongke Khagan, the cousin’s father–and then it was gone.

A hole in the night, that was all.

Temur pulled her down to him and buried his face against her shoulder, crying out something that could have been her name and could have been release and could have been despair.

*   *   *

She slept in his arms, afterward, and Temur lay awake and watched the night go by. The talk at the campfire lulled and surged and caught and eventually drifted silent, except for one voice that muttered on, low and plaintive, long after everyone else had either dropped off or resorted to feigning sleep. Another night, Temur might have called out a demand to shut up, people were sleeping. But tonight it was part of the music that surrounded him—the
shush
of wind through the tent lines, the rip of mare’s teeth cropping new grass, the snores of women, the soft talk of young boys on the night watch, the pop of a dying fire. Somewhere in the darkness he heard the cough of a lion, but it was distant, and even the horses barely paused their evening meal to listen.

Sixteen moons drifted across the Veil of Night, towed in a pattern Temur, no shaman-rememberer, did not know how to read for portents.
So few of us left.
He watched them trail through the night, one outracing another, a third falling behind. His own Iron Moon was set apart from the others now, wandering off to the north of the sky. Temur wondered if Qori Buqa was somewhere with a shaman-rememberer, casting stems to find him, or if his uncle had decided to let him live in defeat and ignominy.

It would be smarter, of course, to have him sought and silenced. But Temur didn’t know what resources Qori Buqa still commanded, or if they would extend to a hunt and assassination.

He turned on his side and curled against Edene’s back, burying his face in her hair.

*   *   *

In the morning when they awoke, it seemed that the entire camp had picked up in the night and reintegrated itself around them. Cookfires blazed on three sides, and Temur—unearthing himself from Edene’s hair—found Tsareg Altantsetseg cross-legged beside a cooking fire, a shaman-rememberer—third-sexed, like all those who spoke for Mother Night and the Eternal Sky—sitting beside her and rebinding the eight blue knots on his saddle. He smiled as Temur struggled into his trousers and came up. Altantsetseg just sniffed, and without looking at him, said pointedly, “This fire needs more dung if there’s going to be enough tea for everyone.”

“So it does,” Temur said, as Edene rolled over and propped herself on an elbow. “I’ll go fetch that, then.”

Edene threw him his boots as he went past. He threw her a smile.

*   *   *

From then on, there was no question that Temur was part of the clan. As the hands of days passed, he even heard one or two people from other traveling alliances refer to him as “Tsareg Temur,” and though he was careful to correct them, he began to wonder, with a little hope, if Altantsetseg did indeed intend to adopt him.

Edene came to his blankets every night, until Altantsetseg offered to give them a small tent of their own—with a show of bad grace and a complaint about scaring the horses. Edene refused: Her small sister and cousin needed the tent more.

Altantsetseg
humph
ed, but Temur caught the edge of her toothless grin and realized that she’d been teasing. That eased his heart more than anything. Old women teased and crabbed and picked—but only to their families.

He breathed in and breathed out and felt the war that much farther away and unmissed. When Edene came to him that night, he borrowed her comb and combed out her hair, the sort of office a man might perform for one of his women, if she liked him enough to permit it. And she sat with a small smile and allowed him.

*   *   *

Temur awoke again after moonset, in the hour of phantoms, when the sky grayed and the mist rose and the cold found its way into every limb. Now, there was silence. Edene had curled in on herself, drawing up the blankets, and Temur lifted his head only reluctantly from the island of warmth they’d created to see Bansh standing over them, alert, ears pricked, her fine-boned head dark against the tarnished sky.

Something was wrong.

Temur shook Edene’s shoulder, crouched, reached for his trousers, and pulled them on in haste. She rolled on her back, saw his face, and instantly sat up, pushing her hair behind her shoulders as she groped for her clothes. As she slipped her shirt on, he stuffed the long plait of his hair under his coat and cinched it on. The knife was still sheathed on his belt; he unhooked it and handed it to her.

She took it wordlessly and clenched it between her teeth as she tied her hair into a knot. Then she stood, stepping into her trousers, while Temur went to his pile of gear and lifted his quiver and bow.

A cold wind blew across the steppe. Bansh stamped a hoof, and across the breadth of the camp another mare answered. Temur saw heavy shadows moving against the grass around the perimeter; the Bankhar, awake and alert, scenting the darkness, their huge heads almost lost in the weight of their coats. In the mist, they looked like boulders shaggy with lichen, like molting bears, as they waited, silently, noses to the wind.

Bansh tossed her head once restively and stamped again. Edene put out a hand to the liver-bay’s shoulder. Temur had just decided to risk slipping her bridle on when out in the grayness a mastiff began to bark.

First once, sharp and deep. A warning. Then savagely, heavily, a hard angry sound over a rumble like rolling thunder.

Temur knew that sound. Edene did too, by the look she shot him as she skinned the blade he’d given her. Then every dog in the camp was barking, shepherds and mastiffs both, horses stamping and circling, a stallion squealing threat and outrage.

There was no time to bridle the mare. He set an arrow to his string but did not draw, saving his strength for when he would need it. Around him, the camp was stirring to life, Edene’s cousins and sisters and aunts rolling to their feet, finding weapons, checking on children or elders.

Temur saw two strong women he knew from the campfires start toward him, each shouldering a bow as they strode across the short soft grass, the mist that softened everything curling tenderly about their bodies. They never made it.

What came out of the mist seemed at first the mist itself—gray as a dove-colored dun, as immaterial and cohesive as smoke. But mist never went clothed in a warrior’s quilted coat and trousers, and mist never showed the deep, unbleeding gashes of death wounds below the perfectly ordinary faces of staring dead men. Mist never wore helms bannered in the three-falls tiers of Qori Buqa, or the horsehair twist of the soldiers of Qulan.

Ghosts. The ghosts of the dead of the fall of Qarash. So many who had not had their remains commended to the carrion crows and the sacred vultures. So many who had not had anyone to speak their true names aloud to the wind, that they might pass to the embrace of the Eternal Sky.

So many doomed to haunt the steppe, hungry and lost and crying out for any scrap of warmth that might feed them a brief memory of what it had been to be living.

Temur heard Edene’s sharp intake of breath as the ghosts closed around her cousins. He found himself searching the faces fruitlessly for ones he recognized, his heart savage behind his ribs. He took a step forward, then another, as the ghosts closed on the Tsareg women.

One woman nocked an arrow; the other drew a knife. They stood back-to-back, and Temur saw now that one had a baby on her shoulders, strapped into a cradleboard. They were Qersnyk women; they would fight any way they could.

There was no way to fight ghosts with a bow.

Temur watched in horror as a captain of Qori Buqa’s army reached out his transparent hand and scraped it down the face of one of the Tsareg women. She was the one carrying the infant. She did not scream; she shouted, instead, and struck out, lashing around her with the knife. The child’s outraged shriek joined the rising cacophony of fruitless battle.

“Salt!” Edene cried.

He looked at Edene. “Salt,” he said, as the sense of her word penetrated his despair. Salt and iron. Iron alone couldn’t harm a ghost.…

She was already scrabbling through his saddlebags, squeezing and discarding pouches until she found one that must have gritted between her fingers in the right way. She cut the knot with Temur’s knife, then spat on the blade so grains would adhere when she plunged it into the gritty purple-black salt that came all the way from Tsarepheth.

Temur snatched a handful of arrows from his quiver and imitated her, then cast salt by the handful in arcs around Bansh and Edene to form a circle.

It might work. “Stay with Bansh,” he said to Edene, not waiting to see if she nodded.

He snatched up the bag of salt, turned away, and hurdled over the protective circle. A pair of bounds took him almost to Edene’s embattled cousins.