They got old Charaqa back a little before dark.
The horse had not moved. It was still standing in the track where it had stopped, with the old man folded down over its neck and his hands still in the mane, and it let Bekter take the bridle without any trouble at all, the way a horse does when it has been waiting some time for somebody to come and take responsibility.
Old man was alive. That was the first surprise. The second was that he could still be furious.
He swore at them the whole way back, in a thin voice, with his eyes shut—not at Bekter and not at Temüjin, but at the men going east, at their fathers, at the fact that his own hands would not hold the mane properly any more. He was seventy years old and he had been speared through the back for arguing, and what he wanted, all the way home, was for somebody to admit that he had been right.
Nobody argued with him. Bekter walked at the horse's head and Temüjin walked at its flank with a hand on the old man's leg to keep him aboard, and the light went out of the sky over the river, and they brought him in.
The women got him into his own tent and did what could be done, which was not much and did not take long.
Temüjin went in afterwards.
He had not planned to. He had been outside tending the horses, which had become the place he went when there was nothing useful in him, and he had put it off twice, and then his feet had taken him round the felt and in through the door.
The old man was lying on his side because he could not lie any other way. There was a lamp. Somebody had put a bowl down beside him that he was not going to drink.
Temüjin crouched where he could be seen.
And Charaqa opened his eyes and made his report.
"The people your good father gathered," he said. "The people of all of us. They have taken them and gone."
He stopped to get the air for the rest of it.
"I went after them. This is how I was answered."
Then he lay there and waited, with his eyes on Temüjin's face, for the boy to say what was to be done.
That was the thing.
Not the wound, and not the swearing, and not the seventy years of his soon ending life. It was that the old man had turned his head and made a report—properly, in order, the way a man gives an account to the head of a household—to a ten-year-old crouching on the floor of his tent, and was now waiting to be told.
He could have made it to Temüjin's mother. She had been in this tent a little while ago and had done what there was to do, and she was the head of what was left of them, and everybody in the camp knew it. He had let her finish and go out. He had waited, with a hole in his back, for somebody else to come round the felt—and then he had opened his eyes and given his account to the person who did.
And old man Charaqa had not gone east with the rest, and no rule anywhere had required him to stay. He was Khongotan and this was not his lineage and not his quarrel.
Regardless he had ridden out alone at seventy after forty households on the strength of nothing but his own opinion of what was owed.
Charaqa. He had been carrying that name around with him for most of a life that happened somewhere else, where it had been one line in a book: a name, the people he belonged to, and a son underneath him who got considerably more room.
And the son was the man who had ridden five days to fetch Temüjin. The one who had sat in Dei Sechen's ger telling the boy a kind lie about his mother, and had taken him east, and had come apart by a river on the way. Temüjin had put that face on his mind palace the same evening—the boot face, the slow answers.
Temüjin's face went, and there was no warning at all.
It came up out of somewhere he himself had not known, and he could not control it, and for two or three seconds he was a child crying in front of a dying man because he had nothing to give him and had just been asked.
He took another look at Charaqa who had already closed his eyes, then he got up and went out.
He stood between the tent and the carts with his back against the felt and let it finish, which did not take long, and then wiped his face with the flat of his hand, which was a thing he had learned by watching a man do it beside a stream, and stood a while longer in the dark.
He was not confused about it. He had been in this world seven months and had buried a father he had never met without producing a thing, and had stood in a full ger while a family grieved over a lost husband and father. And now an old man he had spoken to perhaps nine times in his life had made him shed tears.
His mother came out of her ger while he was still at it.
He knew from the way she was walking that something was going to happen, and he stopped what he was doing and watched, and so did the two women by the fire, and nobody said anything to her.
She went into the ger that had been his father's gear-store since the day they buried him, and she was in there some time, and when she came out she had the standard in her hand.
Nobody made a sound. Nobody came over. One of the women by the fire went back to what she had been doing, and the other one watched her the way you watch a person carrying something heavy, in case they need a hand and do not want to be offered one.
She got up onto a horse with it and turned east and put the horse straight into a canter out of the ring, alone, in the dark, and that was the last of her for a long time.
Temüjin stood where he was and understood that he had spent the entire day on this, household by household, being careful and being reasonable and being extremely good at it, and had come away with nothing whatsoever.
Going after them had not crossed his mind.
***
He did not sleep, and somewhere in the small hours he went into his mind palace to look up his own mother. She was in the forefront of his memories with the rest of what was coming soon, and what was written on her that night was one sentence long. She brought back half the people, and they did not stay.
It did not say whether she came back. It did not say what a woman alone catching a moving camp in the dark gets said to her, or done to her, or how far she had to ride, or by whom she was met. Nobody had written that down, because any sensible author would not have thought it was the interesting part, and his mind palace gave back exactly what had been put into it and not one thing more.
He came out and sat by the fire until it got light, in possession of the outcome and of nothing whatsoever that was any use.
Charaqa died somewhere in that hour, with nobody sitting up with him. One of the women put her head out of his tent a little before dawn and said so across the ring, and went back in. Nothing could be done about it with half the camp gone and the other half waiting to see whether the mother came back, so he was left where he was with the flap tied.
His kind son was a long way off with the Khongotan and would not hear of any of it for days, and there was nobody to spare to go and tell him.
***
She came back the next afternoon with half the camp behind her.
He watched them come down the shallow bank in a straggle nearly a mile long: carts, animals, men riding with their eyes somewhere else, women walking. Twenty households, near enough. She rode at the front of it and she did not look particularly triumphant and she did not look at anyone.
She got down, and handed the standard to Bekter, and said that the far side of the ring should be left clear.
That was everything she ever said about it. She never at any point told anybody what she had said out there, or to whom, or whether she had said anything at all.
They put their gers up and lit their fires and the ring was a ring again, and for about four days it was possible to believe that the thing had been stopped.
Then a household went in the night.
Two more went at the end of the week, in the daytime, with no unpleasantness—they came and said something to his mother first, and she heard them out, and they went. After that it stopped being an event. They went a family at a time over about a month, quietly, without any of them ever giving a reason that he was privy to.
By early summer the ring was down to the gers it had been before she rode out.
He worked at it for a long while and got nowhere near an answer. Then one evening he stood watching her portion out a very small amount of food between eight people without any fuss, and it dawned on him.
She had known.
She had simply looked at forty households in the dark and understood exactly what they were worth and exactly how long they would stay—and had gone out and got them anyway, because half of a camp for one month was worth having, and because a woman with seven children does not get to decline a month.
What she had not known was whether she would catch them at all, or what would be said to her, or whether she was coming back. Those were the things Temüjin has no record of. She had ridden out despite all the risks.
He had spent a day declining to act on a certainty. She had spent a night acting without one.
***
Terms introduced
- the standard — a chief's flag, and the token of a following: cloth on a shaft, packed away with his gear rather than flown from a pole outside, brought out when he moves or fights, and given the sprinkling before a war.
- the Khongotan — a people camped with Temüjin's, and not of his line. They owe nothing to it beyond long habit, which makes what one of them chooses to do his own affair entirely.