By the end of that winter Temüjin had found out what the books meant by spring.
Not green. Green came later. Spring was the month the last of the winter meat ran out and the mares were not yet in milk, and everyone walked around thin and short-tempered under a sky that had finally stopped trying to kill them. It was the hungriest part of the year. He had read the sentence a dozen times without once understanding that it was about a feeling in the stomach.
He had also started counting again. He noticed himself doing it, somewhere around the first running water, and did not stop.
He did not sleep that night, and it took some doing.
The body was nine and had been carrying water and dung all day and wanted very much to be unconscious. He lay under the felts with his eyes open and listened to five other people breathing and thought about a paragraph.
He knew the order of it. The offering came, and his mother was not given her share, and she said so, and was answered. Then the camp moved, and the moving was the thing that mattered, and everything after it was hunger for years.
What the book had not said was how far it was to the ancestral ground, or what hour they went, or whether anyone was told. Those had not been worth writing down.
So he lay there and listened for horses.
He got them somewhere in the grey before dawn: not many, unhurried, and no voices at all, which was the part that told him. People leaving in the dark on ordinary business talk. He was up and out through the door before he had decided to be.
Twelve or fifteen riders, already small, going out past the last of the carts.
He went back in and shook his mother awake, and she was on her feet before he had finished saying it.
They rode out with the sun barely up, his mother and Sochigel and the boys, and Bekter had the horses ready before anyone asked him to, because that was the sort of thing Bekter did.
Nobody talked on the way. His mother rode ahead of all of them with her back straight and her chin level, in the tall hat, dressed exactly as a woman dresses to stand at the ancestors' ground, and Temüjin, watching her from behind, understood that she had known this was possible.
They were not first. They were not even early enough for it to be an argument.
It was finished when they came up. The fires were down to ash and the smell of it was still in the air, sweet and burnt and thick, and people were sitting about in the ordinary sprawl of people who have eaten. Bowls were going round. Somebody laughed at the far end.
The meat was gone. The drink was going.
Temüjin got down and did what he had been doing for the better part of a year, which was to stand still and look like a boy.
Two women sat where the fire had been. They were old and they were sitting in the place that got sat in by whoever had done the thing, and he knew who they were before anybody said a word, because he had known who they were for most of his adult life. Örbei and Soqatai, the wives of a man who had been khan of all the Mongols and had been handed to the Jin and killed for it, and who had left them the only rank in this camp that outranked his mother's.
He had read their names in a footnote. He had never expected them to be sitting down.
Khasar came and stood against his arm and observed, without any particular feeling about it, that they had eaten everything and there was not going to be any.
"No," Temüjin said.
"I could have eaten a lot of that."
"I know."
Khasar accepted this and stayed where he was, putting his weight against Temüjin's arm as though it were a post driven there for the purpose. He never looked at the two old women at all. He was eight, and there was nothing in front of him but a place where food had been and was not.
His mother did not dismount at once, which he thought afterwards was deliberate.
When she did, she walked up to the ash and stood over them and said it in a voice that carried to everyone in the hollow.
"Is it because Yesügei Ba'atur is dead," she said, "and my sons are not grown, that you keep back my share of the ancestors?"
He worked out why while she was still speaking, and the answer was worse than being wrong.
The rule was real. She had not forgotten it, and grief had not carried her past it. She had said his name on purpose, because saying it was the point—this is a widow's household, you are treating it like one, and I am going to make you hear the reason out loud.
His book had told him the rule. It had said nothing whatsoever about what people did with rules. It could not. Nobody writes that part down, because everybody alive already knows it.
He did the arithmetic on what he had left, and came up short. He had been trading on a custom that turned out to be a thing you could pick up and hit someone with.
"The meat," his mother said. "The drink. Before my own eyes you eat, and I am not asked. You go out in the dark and nobody wakes me."
The elder of the two took her time, and when she answered she did not answer angrily, and the lack of anger was the entire answer.
"There is a rule," she said, "for one like you. She is not called. She is not given food."
The other one said it after her, in the same flat way, the way you say a thing that has been said for a long time before you were born to say it:
"There is a custom for one like you. She eats what she comes upon."
And they sat there, two old women in the ash, and looked up at his mother, and waited.
Temüjin had spent a month at the Onggirat learning that he could lose an argument to a man who was simply right. This was not that. Nobody here was making an argument at all. His mother had said a true thing, loudly, in front of witnesses, and had been answered with a rule.
And the rule did not have to be defended, or shown to be just, or weighed against what she had said, because it was not that kind of thing. It was the shape of the ground.
There was nobody to appeal to.
He turned that over and found there was no second half to it. Not a bad court. Not a slow court, or a corrupt one, or one he would have to be older to petition. There was no court. There was no one anywhere in the world whose job it was to hear this, and there never had been, and every person in the hollow had grown up knowing it and would have been baffled to be told it was strange.
He was ten years old and he was standing in a treeless country holding two horses, and it occurred to him for the first time, that a person who wanted a thing like that to exist would have to build it himself, out of nothing, against everyone.
"Is it because Ambaqai Qa'an is dead," the elder said, "that we are spoken to in this way. Even by you."
His mother did not answer that.
She stood a moment longer, and then she turned and walked back to her horse, past her sons, without looking at any of them, and got up into the saddle.
That was when the elder said the other thing.
She did not lower her voice for it. It went to the men sitting nearest the ash, in the tone of a piece of business being closed in front of the people it concerns, and they heard her, and not one of them said anything back.
"These ones," she said. "The mothers and the children. Leave them in the camp when we go. Do not take them along."
Someone put a bowl down.
And Temüjin, who had known that sentence since before he could ride, found that reading it beforehand had done nothing for him at all. It was no help against how it sounded out loud, in the cold, in his mother's hearing, on the first warm morning of the year.
He got up onto his horse.
Behind them, as they rode, the people in the hollow went back to their bowls, because nothing had happened that anyone there would have called an event.
Terms
- the ancestral offering — a rite performed at the ground where the ancestors lie: food and drink burned into the earth for them, and what is left divided and eaten by those who came. Who is handed a portion is who belongs.
- the shares — the meat and the drink left over from an offering. Small things, and not really food at all. To be given one is to be inside the family the offering was made for; to be passed over is to be told, without anyone having to say it, that you are not.
- ba'atur — a war-title, and only that: brave, a man who leads other men in a fight. It is not a throne and it does not descend to a son. A khan is elected and may be a ba'atur; a ba'atur is not a khan.
- Tayichiud — the people camped along the Onon with Temüjin's family, and cousins to them at five generations' distance. Descended from a line that has held the khanship and does not currently hold it.