The man came up the river at the end of that summer, on a horse better than anything the household owned, and stopped on the rise above the bend to look down at them for a while before he came on.
Temüjin watched him look.
There was not a great deal to see from up there. Two gers where a ring of twenty had stood eighteen months ago, a scatter of children in the shallows, nine horses on a picket and a mare who still had no intention of giving milk to anybody. And the pole, with nine marmots on it and the skins pegged out along the bank below, which was more than a household of that size should have in the last week of summer.
The man looked at the pole for about as long as it takes to count nine.
Belgütei had the horse before he was down off it and Sochigel had airag in his hands before he had straightened up, and nobody asked him one word about his business until he had eaten.
He was from the three gers downriver, and Temüjin had met him once, in the spring, when he traded eight marmot skins for a self-bow. The man remembered him too, and said so pleasantly, and asked after the bow.
Then he asked about the grass, and about the water, and about the country upriver, and drank, and was given a share of the meat that Hoelun could not spare and gave without a flicker. He ate it slowly, the way a man eats when he knows exactly what it cost.
Then he put the bowl down and said what he had come for, and he said it to Bekter.
It was not a slight. Nobody did it at all; it happened the way water goes downhill. The man had walked into the ger, looked round once, found the biggest male there, and set his business down in front of him.
If anybody had asked him why, he would not have understood the question. He was sitting where a guest sits, at the back, in the place nobody had used since the spring, and from there he leaned forward over the fire and talked to a boy still growing out of his coat.
He would take skins in the autumn. He would give salt for them.
Salt.
Temüjin sat at the door side with his back and remembered last autumn, when he had stood in that river with a net full of fingerlings and worked out that smoking a season's catch would burn the wood for winter.
Salt changed the answer. Salt changed it completely. He could see the whole of the next twelve months rearrange itself around a man riding up the river in the autumn with a bag of it.
He did not say anything, because he was ten and he was sitting by the door and there was nothing he could have said that would not have made the man's eyes go to him.
"How much salt?" Bekter said.
The man told him. Bekter turned it over for about the length of a breath and said that was a fair offer and they would have skins.
"How many?"
"Come and see," Bekter said. "You won't have ridden up for nothing."
He said it well. He did not say too much of it, and he did not look at his mother while he said it, and he did not look at her afterward either. Then he got up and went out with the man to see him onto his horse. Temüjin heard the two of them talking on the bank in the ordinary voices of people who have agreed about something.
***
Hoelun let the fire go down before she said anything.
"Next time he comes," she said, "Bekter talks to him."
Nobody argued. There was nothing in it to argue with. A man riding a good horse up a river does not do business with a woman on her own and he does not do business with a boy of ten. Pretending otherwise would cost this family salt, and this family could not afford to be right about anything at the cost of potential salt.
She was not conceding anything. She had looked at the situation and found the shortest road through it and taken it, the same way she took her belt up in a fold before work. Then she said the fire wanted building up and that was the end of the conversation.
Temüjin sat with his hands round his knees and watched his mother arrange the rest of his childhood without knowing she had done it.
Bekter came and found him at the picket in the morning and stood beside him a while before he said anything.
"That was a good trade you made in the spring. The bow was worth eight skins." He worked a burr out of the mare's mane while he said it, and got it out, and dropped it. "Tell me first, next time."
Then he went to see about the water.
Temüjin stood there holding a headstall he had no use for, and could not think of one thing to refute back.
***
He thought about it that night, flat on his back with the felt ticking above him, and got to the bottom of it faster than he wanted to.
Bekter had done nothing wrong. That was the trouble with it. Bekter had answered a man who spoke to him, and answered him correctly, and secured salt for the household. He had not taken anything. He had not asked for anything. He was simply the biggest male in a ger where there was no longer a grown man.
He was going to be one, sooner or later, and nothing was stopping it. It would arrive the way the summer had arrived.
And the same law that made Bekter the man of this ger would in time hand him the rest of it. Temüjin knew the shape of that from a book, in a sentence so short and so administrative that he had read it once and gone on to the next thing.
He turned it over and found the joke in it and did not enjoy the joke.
Because it went both ways, and it went both ways exactly. Bekter could claim Temüjin's mother and Temüjin could claim Bekter's. The rule did not know the difference between them.
So if he was against the rule, he was against his own claim on Sochigel too. And that claim was never going to come up. Nobody was expecting it either. His principle was free where it was worthless.
Where it was worth something, he was not against a rule at all. He was against a person, and the person had not done anything he was not entitled to do.
And underneath all of it, nobody was going to ask his mother her opinion. Not Bekter, least of all. Not the rule, which had been in place long before any of them were born.
He lay there with that for a while.
It did not resolve into an answer. He was ten years old and he had a thing in his chest about it that he could not have written down in any language, including his own, and no argument under it that would have survived any scrutiny, starting with his mother's.
So he asked the only question that was left, which was how much time he had before it was too late to change anything.
And the answer came back blank.
He had never had dates in the mind palace. He had never needed them. What he had was the order—this, and then this, and then this—and the order was the whole of it, every memory holding on to the one in front of it. It had been enough for two years.
Now he could not tell what was coming next.
He had not lost any memory. He just did not know where he stood in the ones he had.
He worked out how that had happened, and it did not take long. It had started with the trade he made for the bow. Everything near the front of it was built on nothing happens here for a while, and there was now a man no book had ever mentioned who knew where they camped and what hung on their pole.
The same man. The one who had put his bowl down that afternoon and talked across the fire to Bekter.
Everything further out stayed intact, and he had no use for any of it this winter.
***
He did not tell anybody, then or ever, and there was nobody to tell.
He lay with his arm over his eyes and set it out honestly, because there was no point in doing it any other way. On the one side: two out of three successful hunts instead of one, a coat that got finished, everybody through the cold months, and now salt, which was the first thing he had wanted in this world.
On the other side: the next two years, which he had owned outright and did not any more, and a brother who had been handed the front of the ger by a man his own good idea had fetched up the river.
He had known that actions had a cost. He had known before he opened his mouth to Khasar that spring that there was no small change and nothing came free. He had thought he understood it. Unable to tell which near event came next, he discovered that understanding what a thing costs has almost nothing in common with paying for it.
Outside, the boys had the fire going again and Khasar was telling somebody about a crane.
***
Terms
- the meat pole — a pole set up by a household to hang what has been taken, and dry it. It is the plainest statement of a family's condition available on the open steppe.
- the door side — the low place in a ger, on the near side of the fire by the entrance. The far side facing the door belongs to the head of the household and to guests who matter; the door side is where the youngest and the least sit.
- levirate marriage — the custom by which a dead man's widow may be taken as a wife by a younger male of his family: a brother, a nephew, or a son by one of his other women, which is the commonest of the three. A man may not take his own mother; every other wife his father had is open to him. It runs downward only, to a younger man or a younger generation, and an older one is barred.