There were nine horses.
He counted them the way he counted everything, the first morning at the new ground, and got nine, and counted again in the evening and got nine, and that was the number for a long time afterward. Nine geldings and a bad-tempered mare who had no intention of giving milk to anybody.
Everything else that a household is had gone east in the spring.
They came down off the good grazing to a bend of the Onon nobody else wanted, which was how they could have it.
There was water and there was a stand of trees, and the trees were the entire reason. The ground came up in birch and bird cherry along the bank, and there was a fish in the river.
His mother worked out all of that in about a day and a half, without discussing it with anybody, and then moved them.
She had a way of getting ready for work that he came to know very well that year: she would put her hat straight and pull it down hard, and then take her belt in a fold and tie it up short so her skirt came off the ground, and then go. It took about as long as a breath. He saw her do it several hundred times and never once saw her hesitate in the middle of it.
She was not going to be seen doing this in a hitched-up skirt with her hair down like a woman of no family. She was going to do it in the hat.
***
The work was not hard to understand. It was only endless.
There were roots along the bank—burnet and silverweed, and a couple of others he never got a name for—and you got them out with a stick of spruce sharpened at one end and hardened in the fire, and it took a long time and produced, at the end of an afternoon, a small heap of things like dirty fingers. They ate them boiled. They were not good but they were food, which turned out to be a separate quality altogether from either.
There were crab apples and bird cherries in their season and none in any other.
And there was the river, which they fished with needles.
That was Belgütei's idea originally, or somebody's—you took a needle, and you got it hot, and you bent it round, and you got a fish hook that was not very good but nevertheless a fish hook. They caught the small ones, the mean paltry ones nobody with a choice would have looked at, and when there were enough hands they dragged a net of woven stuff along the shallows and got fingerlings by the double handful.
He had read, somewhere, that the Mongols would not eat fish. Standing on the Onon in the first hard weather with his feet numb and a net in his hands, he made a small private note about how much of what he knew had been written down by men who had never been hungry in the place they were describing.
***
He spent that autumn going through his mind palace like a man turning out a store-tent, and found almost nothing he could use.
He knew what a crop rotation was. There was no soil here worth the word and no one to work it and nobody who would stay in one place long enough to see it. He knew, roughly, what a better furnace looked like. He had no ore, no fuel, no smith, and no way to explain to anyone why a boy of ten was interested. He knew a dozen things about how to feed an army and not one about how to feed six children and two women in a country that had just finished demonstrating exactly what an abandoned household went through.
The only real idea he had was the same idea he had always had, which was store the surplus, and he went at it properly, because there was fish coming out of that river in quantity in the autumn and none of it in the winter, and any fool could see the shape of the problem.
He got nowhere. Salt he did not have and could not get. Smoking took wood in a quantity they could not spare from a stand of trees that also had to keep the whole household alive through a winter, and he ran the arithmetic twice and got the same answer twice: a season's fish would cost them the fuel to survive the season.
There was nobody to argue with about it. Dei Sechen had at least had the decency to refuse him out loud.
***
Khasar shot things.
That was his job and had been since before the abandonment, and it was a child's job—the sort of thing that gets given to a boy who is old enough to be useful and too young to be worth much. He had a small bow that had been made for somebody else and cut down, and a handful of arrows that were the family's arrows and not his, and were counted.
He went out after marmots.
It was not a heroic activity. A marmot comes up at the mouth of its burrow to have a look at the world and does not stay long about it, and if you are not already drawn when the head appears you have wasted a morning. So Khasar went out before it was light and lay in the grass and did nothing for hours—which Temüjin, who had thirty-odd years of an adult's impatience in him, could not have managed for a quarter of that.
He came back with something perhaps one day in three.
When he missed he went and found the arrow. Always, however long it took, in whatever weather, without anyone having told him to and without appearing to consider it a hardship. There were not many arrows and they were not his, and a lost one was a thing that had to be reported to his mother.
Nobody praised him for it and nobody scolded him when he came back empty, and Temüjin, watching this go on for two months, worked out what was actually happening, which was nothing. Khasar shot. Some days he hit. Nobody, including Khasar, had the faintest idea whether he was better in the autumn than he had been in the spring, because there was no way anybody had ever thought to find out.
***
In the middle of that winter Khasar came back with a marmot and gave him half of it.
He did it without any ceremony whatsoever. He came in, and got the thing off his shoulder, and dealt with it at the fire, and then handed over a share that was too big, and started talking about a fox he had seen doing something ridiculous on the ice.
Temüjin sat with it in his hands.
He had been awake in this life for something over a year. In that time he had not had one exchange with another human being that he had not been carefully speaking—every sentence checked on the way out, every name gone round, every silence timed. He was extremely good at it now. He did it the way other people breathe.
There was nothing to manage here. The boy was not testing him, or comforting him, or asking him for anything, or noticing that he had gone quiet. He wanted somebody to hear about the fox.
Temüjin ate the marmot and heard about the fox.
***
He started counting in the spring.
Not out loud. He simply went out with his brother in the mornings when he could be spared, and lay in the wet grass a hundred paces off doing nothing, which he was getting better at, and kept a number in his head. Shots taken. Shots that hit. The distance, paced out afterward when Khasar had gone on ahead.
He did it for six weeks before he said a single word about it to anybody, and what he had at the end of them was a number. Not a technique, not a trick. Every part of the shooting itself belonged to his brother, who was better at all of it than he would ever be.
They counted distance here. Everybody did. A man was said to have put an arrow three hundred arm-spans and it would be repeated for thirty years and nobody would ever check it.
Nobody had ever once thought to count what a man missed.
***
Terms
- no friend but a shadow, no whip but a tail—an old saying. It is how a household with nobody is described: no companion but the shape it puts on the ground, and nothing to drive a horse with but the animal's own tail. What it tells is that this household cannot lend, cannot be borrowed from, and cannot be counted on for anything.
- the digging stick—a length of spruce sharpened at one end and fire-hardened, for getting roots out of hard ground. The tool of a household with nothing: it costs an afternoon to make and an afternoon to fill.
- burnet and silverweed—two of the roots a family eats when there is nothing else. Dug in quantity, boiled, and eaten.
- marmot—a heavy ground squirrel of the open steppe.