The rider came out of the east in the middle of the afternoon, and Temüjin saw him first, because he had been looking east for a month.
He was up on the long slope with the sheep when the dot showed on the skyline. One man, and a second horse[1] on a lead beside him. Nobody led a spare unless he meant to change onto it and keep going. It was the shape of a man who had somewhere to be and had already decided not to sleep on the way.
Temüjin sat down in the grass.
He had wondered, in a distant way, what he would feel when it came. He had not been able to guess, and had stopped trying, and now it was here and he could look at it directly for the first time.
He had never met his father.
That was the whole of it, and he had spent a month keeping his back to it. As near as he could put it together, the boy who had ridden into this camp beside Yesügei had lasted a few days and then gone under a fever, and whatever that boy had carried for the man had gone into the ground with him. What sat up afterward had inherited the reins, the language, and no father. He could not have picked Yesügei out of a line of three men. He had a name, a reputation, a date, and a cause of death, and every one of those had come to him from a book.
So what went through him on the slope was not grief, and it was not going to be.
It was the other thing. It was a month of waiting arriving all at once—the breath he had been holding taken out of his hands. His ears went strange. His fingers were cold in high summer.
It would look exactly right. That was the ugly part. He would not have to lie once. He would only have to stand in a ger full of people and let all of them be wrong about which fact had done this to him.
He got the sheep down the slope. He took his time about it, because there was no hurry now and would not be again.
By the time he reached the ring, the camp already had the man.
Two boys had the horses. A woman had a bowl out to him before he was properly off the saddle, and he drank standing, the way a man drinks who has been in the wind since morning. They walked him to Dei Sechen's ger. Somebody went for the good airag. Somebody else was already pulling curds and dried meat onto a board, and a felt was shaken out and put down in the place near the far side where a guest who mattered was put.
Nobody asked him why he had come.
That was the rule[2], and it was not a soft one. A man off the road was watered, and seated, and fed, and asked about the grass and the water and whose camps he had passed and whether the ground was hard yet in the north. His business waited until he had eaten. A hungry man in a hurry gave a poor account of himself, and a household that heard bad news before it had fed the man who carried it would be a household that had traded a meal for a quarrel.
Temüjin sat in his usual place and worked out that the news was already in the ger. It had been in the ger since the man crossed the threshold. It was sitting four paces away eating curds, and custom had put a bowl in front of it and made everyone wait.
In the century he came from, news arrived before the thing it described had finished happening. Here it travelled at the speed of a horse, and then, having travelled all that way, was made to sit down and eat.
He kept his hands still and listened to a man he had read about, years ago, in another life, describe the state of the water on the road east.
The man was ordinary. That was somehow the worst of it. Weathered, unhurried, thick through the shoulders, with a face like a boot and a way of answering questions slightly slower than he needed to. He was frightened underneath it. Temüjin could see that and was reasonably sure nobody else could—not because he was clever, but because he was the only person in the ger who knew what the man was frightened of.
Somebody used his name. Temüjin had known that name for years and had never once heard it out loud, and hearing it in a stranger's mouth was like watching a word he had only ever read get up and walk.
He also knew, from the same warm room and the same century that had not been built yet, what one of this man's sons would eventually grow into, and roughly what it would cost to be rid of him.
The man was eating curds[3].
So while the bowl went round again, Temüjin went into the palace and put him away properly.
Front corridor, second room, the one where he kept people he had only ever met on a page and was now going to meet in the flesh. He set the face on the shelf next to the name that had been there for years—the boot face, the slow answers, the frightened thing underneath that nobody else in the ger could see. He added the two horses. He added that the man had not once looked at him directly since sitting down.
That last one he put on the windowsill, where he kept things he did not understand yet.
*I cannot see anybody plainly,* Temüjin thought. *Not one person here. I meet them all twice and the second time is first.*
Then the board went round again, and the talk came back off the road and the water, and Dei Sechen set his bowl down and asked what had brought him.
"The boy's mother is ill," the man said. "She is asking for him."
There was a small movement in the ger, the kind a room makes when it has been waiting for something and gets it.
Temüjin did not do anything with his face.
There was nothing to do with it. The thing that had started on the slope finished arriving, and it went through him at whatever speed it wanted, and it took his voice with it on the way past. He looked at the fire. His hands had gone somewhere he was not managing.
It was true and it was not about his mother, and no one in the world was going to ask him which.
A hand came down on his shoulder and stayed there. The woman whose name he did not know made a low sound from the eastern side. Dei Sechen was looking at him with his whole face.
They were all being extremely kind to him about the wrong thing.
"He'll go," Dei Sechen said. Then, after a moment, as if the words had come out ahead of him: "He is promised here."
"He is."
"There is service owed. Years of it." Dei Sechen turned the bowl in his hands. "He has been here one month. One."
"His mother is ill," the man said again, in the tone of somebody laying a stone down where it will not be moved.
And that was the end of it, because there was no answer to it, and everyone in the ger knew there was no answer to it. A son went. Dei Sechen could have refused a man asking for a herder, a hostage, a hand at the felting. He could not refuse a man asking for a son.
Temüjin watched him not want to allow it. It was there for a long moment, plain as weather—a man who had dreamed about a falcon and had spent a month watching a boy for signs, being told the boy was leaving in the morning and that the reason was the one reason he could not argue with.
"Bring him back," Dei Sechen said at last.
"That is not mine to promise."
"No." Dei Sechen drank. "Tell his father I said it anyway."
Temüjin looked at the fire and kept looking at it.
They left at first light, which meant the goodbyes happened in the dark, which suited him.
Börte came out to the horses while he was seeing to Khar. She did not help and did not pretend to. She stood with her arms folded against the cold and watched him work the girth.
"Everyone was watching my father," she said.
"Was I supposed to watch your father?"
"Everyone was watching my father," she said again, "and I was watching you."
He did not turn around. The girth was fine. He went on doing things to it.
"Your face didn't do anything," Börte said.
"I heard my mother's sick."
"Mm," said Börte.
He waited for the rest of it, the way you wait for a hand to come down. It did not come. It was never going to come; he had understood that in a ger a few nights ago and kept failing to believe it. Wherever she was stacking these—the doorway, the rider, and now his face—it had one more in it this morning, and she was in no hurry at all.
He finished with the girth and turned round and, because his hands had run out of work and he wanted the old joke back more than he had wanted anything in a while, he held one out to her.
Börte looked at it.
She did not slap it away.
She did not take it either. She looked at it long enough for both of them to understand that she had decided something, and then she stepped back, and went off between the gers in the grey light without a word.
She had never once said goodbye to him. She did not start.
The man was already mounted. Temüjin got up onto Khar and turned her east, toward the road he had read about, and at the end of it a household of people who had known him for nine years, every one of whom he was about to meet for the first time.
[1] remount - a rider with one intends to change onto it and keep going, so a man leading a remount is a man who does not mean to stop for the night.
[2] guest-right - the obligation a household owes anyone who arrives off the road. The rule binds host and traveler both.
[3] hard, sour milk-curd dried in the sun, the staple preserved food of the steppe. It keeps for months, travels well, and is what a guest is given with meat and airag.