The man came back at the end of the autumn with the salt, and Bekter went down the bank to meet him, and Temüjin watched the whole of it from up by the gers with a rope in his hands he had forgotten he was holding.
It was over quickly. They stood by the horse and talked about the weather and then about the skins, and the skins went one way and a hide bag went the other, and Bekter carried it up with both arms round it like a child, because it was heavy and because he had no intention of dropping it.
He put it down in front of his mother and opened the neck of it so she could look in.
Nobody said anything clever. Temülün put her hand in it and got a slap and cried, and then everybody went back to work, and the bag sat by the wall of the ger for the rest of the day.
***
The fish came up the river a week later.
The small mean ones came out of the shallows, in a quantity that was almost funny when you looked at what a family could actually eat in a day. In three mornings the boys took more with the net than the household had taken in the whole of the previous month.
Temüjin had been waiting two years for that week.
He had failed at it the first autumn on materials—no salt, and smoking would have cost more wood than the winter could spare. And now that he had salt, he did not intend to spend a third autumn watching a river empty itself past a hungry family.
So he took a share of the catch and a fistful of the salt and set about making it keep.
He knew that you salted fish. He knew it the way he knew that a bow was drawn with the thumb. He had eaten salted fish out of a jar with a paper label on it, in the other life, and in that whole life he had never given one thought to how it got into the jar.
He rubbed salt on them and put them in the ger where it was warm enough to work without his hands going numb, in a wooden trough with a cloth over the top, and left them.
---
Four days later he knew from the doorway.
He had got them too thick and he had got them too few—a fistful of salt across that many fish was a seasoning, not a cure. He had put them somewhere warm and still, out of the wind, because he had been thinking about his own comfort while he worked. Every one of those was a separate mistake and he had made all of them at once, in confident silence, in front of a woman who had preserved food every year of her adult life.
He carried the trough down to the river and tipped it out and stood there a while.
The problem was not the fish. There would be more fish. It was that he had spent the household's one surplus in the spring and its safety in the autumn to get a bag of salt, and had then thrown away the first thing he made with it.
Hoelun came down the bank behind him and looked at what was going down the current and did not say one word about waste, which was worse.
"What were you doing?"
"Making them keep. Through the winter."
She thought about that for a moment. Then she said, "Bring me forty of them and the thin knife," and went back up.
***
She did not use the salt.
She cut them down the back and opened them out flat and took the guts and the spine, and cut what was left thin enough to see the daylight through when she held one up—and then she went into the ger and hung them on a line under the roof, in the shade, where the smoke went out and the air came round.
Then she left them alone for a month.
There was no fire under them and no salt on them and no cover over them. He stood there on the second evening looking up at forty fish turning slowly in the dark of the roof and understood that he had been beaten by the meat that had hung over his head every single day.
She had done it with meat every autumn of her life. Everybody had. It was so ordinary that nobody had ever mentioned it to him, and he had never asked, because he had come into this world holding the answer to a question he had not bothered to ask anybody about first.
The salt was not wasted. Salt is never wasted. It went on the food and it went to the horses and it was worth having.
***
They came through that winter with fish in the roof.
He had never been afraid of a winter in this life. He had been cold and hungry in them and he had watched a child of five cry in a way that he had never seen, but underneath all of it there had always been one fact. From the books he knew the family lived. It was the only thing his whole strange advantage had ever reliably given him, and it had been holding him up since the day he woke in a ger among strangers with a countdown running.
This winter there was no such guarantee.
He went over the order of events he recorded in his mind palace in the first hard month. It could not tell him what was coming. After that he left it alone, and lay in the dark like everybody else in the ger, who had never been able to tell either.
He found it very difficult. He also found, somewhere around the turn of the year, that it had made him easier to be around.
They came through. Four households along that stretch of the river did not, and one of them was the summer camp of three gers downriver, which broke up and went to relatives, so the man with the good horse did not come back in the spring after all.
***
She said it in the spring, at the drying line, with her arms up.
He was handing the last of fish down to her—they had eaten nearly all of it and what was left had gone hard as bark—and she took one and turned it over and did not put it in the basket.
"Where did you learn that fish would keep?"
"Everybody knows that."
"No," she said. "They don't. You knew there was a way to do it before you had ever seen it done. You had a word for it. You went at it like a man doing a work he knows how." She put the fish in the basket at last. "You have never seen anybody do it. Not here, not anywhere. I would know. I was there."
He said nothing. He had answers ready. Every one of them would have made her ask another question, and that was the one he could not answer.
"You knew the ancestors' ground was that morning. You went round the households before they left us. You gave away my marmot skins and you were right about the skins." She said all of it without any heat at all, in the voice she used daily. "You have not been the same since the fever."
He had seen it coming for two years. There was no way she would not notice the changes. He was not the Temujin before and he also could not keep pretending.
"I was very sick," he said.
"You were." She was still working. "I sat with you. You did not know me at the end of it."
"I know you now."
"You know me the way a man knows a horse he has ridden a season."
She paused for a bit.
"I am not asking what happened to you. I do not think you could tell me and I do not think I would like it."
He waited for the rest of the sentence.
"You reach into things," she said. "You have done it since you recovered. Every single time you have been right, and every single time somebody has come to us afterward. My skins bought a bow and the bow filled the pole and the pole brought a man. That is one line of thought I can follow it, and I am not clever."
And there was nothing to say to that, because it was the whole of the argument, and the only reply he had was not the one he could say out loud.
***
He stayed out at the line in the last of the light and looked at the empty rack, and worked out that she was going to be right about him for the rest of her life. Not right about what he was—she would never get near that. But she would be right about the rest. Right about the reaching, and about what it cost, and the fact that he would go on doing it anyway.
Across the ring, Bekter was getting the horses in for the night, and he had gotten tall enough over the winter that from a distance and in bad light you could have taken him for a grown man.
Temüjin stood in the cold and reminded himself that he was ten, and he still had four years to find something better than an arrow to Bekter's heart.
***
Terms
- borts — meat, or here fish, cut thin and hung on a line under the roof of the ger, in the shade, where the air moves. What comes down is hard as wood and preserved for years.
- lake salt — salt scraped off the shallow salt lakes of the eastern steppe in the dry season.