Chapter Twenty-Three
One Yurt
The ger stood in the lee of a long grey ridge, three hours past the second frozen creek — a small hunter's ger, one hoop of bent willow, a smoke-hole, felt-walls the colour of a tea-stained tooth, a door-flap of dehaired hide pegged with four thongs. Berke had told us at the second willow that it belonged to a hunter who had not come back in the spring, and who, by two winters of cold smoke-hole, was not coming back at all.
We came up at the grey light past dawn — the bay mare and the chestnut at a walk, the grey jenny riderless behind with Möngke-Dam's drum knotted to her saddle, Belegt three paces off my boot, the bird in the north-east, Berke fifty paces back on the spare string.
The blizzard came at the changing of the second hour, out of the north-east off the higher plateau, and took the white grass and the lee and the trampled snow at the door of the ger in the space of a few breaths.
Berke turned in the saddle. "My prince. This will hold to the second night. The Vermillion won't come up the pass in it. Get inside — I'll set the horses at the windbreak."
"Berke—"
"I'll sleep at the windbreak with the horses, my prince. I've done it before."
"Berke."
"Go in."
Toghrul looked at me and said nothing. I held the rein a moment, and then I said it into the wind: "Berke. Inside."
"Daughter. The windbreak is enough."
"The windbreak is for the bay mare and the chestnut and the grey jenny. It is not for a man who warded my prince's bürkii at the willow eleven days. Inside."
He looked at Toghrul, who nodded once, and Berke bowed in the saddle. "Yes, daughter."
He set the spare string at the windbreak and the three horses in its lee, carried the wineskins and saddles and felts to the door, banked the spare felts against the windward wall, and laid the wagon-master's tinder at the firepit the dead hunter had dug, and struck it with the steel-and-flint the Khan had given him at the naadam of his sixtieth year. The fire took. He settled at the windward of it, set Khaghan-bürkii hooded on the perch the hunter had cut into the willow, and laid his wineskin at his elbow.
"My prince. Daughter. The watch is mine. The blizzard is mine. The bürkii is mine. Sleep." He set his boots under his blanket and his head at the saddle and closed his eyes, and did not open them again.
The blizzard took the wind at the door. The fire held.
The ger was the first roof I had been under that was not the empire's since the morning of the kitchen-floor. I had not understood, until I sat down inside it, how much of me had been bracing against the empire's roofs — the muster-barracks at Yulin with its forty men to a room and its smell of wet wool and unwashed boys, the squad-tent with its careful watch on every word, the prisoner-tent with its lamp at the second quarter and its two Vermillion Guard at the seam. This roof watched no one. It was a dead hunter's ger, one hoop of bent willow gone the colour of old honey in the firelight, the felt-walls thick and close and smelling of the cold smoke of two empty winters and, under that, faintly, of the hunter himself — old leather, old tallow, the dry mineral smell of a man's long absence. The smoke went up clean through the hole at the cap and the blizzard turned over it and did not come down. Inside, the air held the heat of the fire and the heat of the three of us and the bird and the wolf, and it was the first warm air I had breathed without watching my own mouth in seventeen weeks.
I sat at the lee of the fire in the wool deel under the unlaced lamellar, the binding-cloth off, the boots off, the brown-paper square in my right cuff, my hands palms-down on my knees, Belegt at my hip with his head between his paws and his eyes on the door-flap. I had taken the binding-cloth off. That was the small enormous thing of the ger: I had unwound the soldier's knot my mother taught me at the spring sowing of my tenth year and breathed in for the first time without the cloth pulling against the breath, and no man in the felt had turned his head, because there was no longer any man in any felt I had to hide from. Berke at the windward knew what I was. Toghrul knew. The wolf had always known. The bird at the rafter had told the falconer at the willow on the seventh day. I sat under a dead hunter's roof with my breath my own and the cloth coiled at the foot of the felt like a thing shed, and I held my hands palms-down on my knees and felt the old brace go out of my shoulders, joint by joint, the way frost goes out of a field at the first hour of a thaw.
Toghrul sat at the windward, in the same lamellar he had worn under the chain, the same bandage at his thigh, the soldier's knot set to the size Möngke-Dam had told him to set it when the blood came back to the leg. The blood had come back. He had bled through the bandage three hours past the second creek and said nothing of it. But I had seen — at the lip of the second ridge, when the chestnut shied and he caught the rein, his left wrist had gone white where the muscle pulled, and the arm had gone slack a moment after. I had not said. He had not asked me to.
"At the ger," he had said, on the bond, into the wind. "Not now."
"At the ger," I had answered. And he had ridden the rest of the way.
Now we were at the ger. I crossed the fire and knelt at his left side, at the bandaged thigh, with a strip of clean wrap in my right hand and the mare's-milk skin in my left and the pen-grass Möngke-Dam had pressed into my palm at the entry of the throat — three pinches of it. I did not look at his face, and he did not look at mine.
I unlaced the bandage at the soldier's knot. It was wet at the inside. In fifteen nights at the prisoner-tent I had wound this bandage and set this knot and never once taken it off. I had wound it over the under-shirt, at four paces, with the wax-tablet a hand's reach away and the orderly's eyes on the flap, and the winding had been a soldier's task done to a prisoner's leg, the dressing of a wound that kept a hostage alive long enough to be of use to the empire. I had told myself that for fifteen nights, and it had been a lie I needed, and I had needed it the way the hands needed the drilled draw — to keep the wanting out of the work so the work could be done.
I took the bandage off now. There was no lie left to need. The wound was the size of my own palm — a salt-iron quarrel from the seventh day of the Ash Forest, high at the inside of the thigh near the femoral, the orderly's stitches uneven at the bottom edge, and it was the bottom edge that had pulled and bled at the hard gallop up the pass. The flesh around it had the angry shine of a thing that had healed wrong and then been asked to run before it was ready, and I read it with my eyes the way Möngke-Dam had taught me at the folding-stool to read a wound: the colour at the rim, the heat off it under the back of my hand, the smell. The smell was clean. The blood was bright, not the dark of a wound gone bad. He would keep the leg. He would limp on it some days the rest of his life, in the cold, the way Liu's outrider-arrow told him the weather under his shoulder; but he would keep it. I cleaned it with the wrap and the mare's-milk and the pen-grass, and the pen-grass bit at it and he did not move, and I worked at the slow even pace of a person doing the one thing that is hers to do, and rewound the bandage, and set the knot the way my mother had taught me at the spring sowing of my tenth year. My hands knew his thigh now the way they knew the bow. Then I lifted my hand and sat back on my heels and looked up.
He was looking at me. He had been looking the whole time, and had not looked away.
He said it into the felt between us — a felt of one pace now, not four; the closest I had been to him in any of the fifteen nights; the pace at which two chests are no longer at four paces but at one, where the bowls are, for an anda of nineteen and a prince of twenty-four a night and a half-day out of a hostage-camp, very nearly the same bowl:
"Arsulan."
"Toghrul."
He laid the back of his right wrist against the back of my left, where my hand still rested at the bandage-knot, and I turned my wrist to meet his, and we held there a moment. Then he set his forehead to the small space between our foreheads — the way Belegt had set his on the blue snow at the third syllable of I will not hide — and held it there, and I lifted my left hand from the bandage and set my palm at the back of his neck, where the cropped hair had grown out a thumb's breadth from the orderly's shears, warm under my hand, the hair of a man who had not been outside the prisoner-tent in thirty days.
He set his mouth to mine — at the small soft place at the corner of my lower lip, where I had bitten the inside the morning my mother set the scissors to my braid, healed now since the third week of the muster, a place no man's mouth had been. No man's mouth had been at any place. I was nineteen years old and I had spent the last seventeen weeks being a man, and the years before that being a daughter who carried a wolf she could not name in the bowl of her chest and a mother who would not say her true name aloud and a country that would have killed her for either; and in all of it there had been no room for a mouth on a mouth, no hour, no safe dark, no person who knew both my names and wanted them. I had thought the wanting was a thing I had set down at the orchard gate with the rest of the wanting. It had not been set down. It had been waiting at the rim of the same rib where the wolf's warmth waited, folded small, and at the touch of his mouth it came up whole and unfolded and I did not know what to do with my hands until I found I had already set one at the back of his neck and the other had not moved from the bandage-knot at his thigh, and that was the answer my hands gave, the same as always, before the rest of me had finished asking the question.
We did not move at first. Then I opened my mouth at that soft place and he opened his — the mouth of a man who had kissed no other mouth in thirty days, the mouth I had been carrying in the bowl of my chest for fifteen nights at the lamp at four paces — and we held it, the both of us, in the felt of a ger at the foot of the Iron Gates in a blizzard, a wolf at my hip and a bird at his rafter and the bear and the old woman behind us in the snow.
I drew back the small space of a breath, and he drew back with me, and we held there.
He breathed in, and said it into the small space between our mouths — in the open-air word, not the bond's word and not the prisoner-tent's word but the word of a man at the felt of a ger at the first hour of the second night of the breakout:
"Arsulan. I love you."
He said it again: "Arsulan. I love you."
And a third time: "Arsulan. I love you."
And then he waited — and did not ask me to say it back. He had told me, at the prisoner-tent on the fifteenth night, that he would never ask, on any night; and at the felt of the ger, his mouth a breath from mine, he did not ask.
I said it instead, in the smallest voice I had used in any room since the morning of the kitchen-floor — smaller than my voice into the wind at the supply-wagon, smaller than the syllable I had breathed into the cold pad of Belegt's nose on the blue snow:
"I will say it back to you — on a night that is not this night — in the way the bond translates the saying, in the third saying of an anda of nineteen years. I will say it on the morning we ride south to take my mother out of the empire. Not tonight, Toghrul. Tonight, in this ger, with the bear and the old woman in the snow at the lee of the second ridge, the saying would be a thing I owed them. I will not owe them the saying. On the morning we ride south, I will owe it only to you."
He let it settle. "Good," he said. "I have been told — by a woman who knows how a thing is owed. On the morning we ride south, I will wait for the saying."
I set my forehead to his, and he to mine, and we let our breath go between us, slow.
The blizzard took the wind at the door. Belegt set his head on his paws. The bird shifted under its hood. Berke breathed the slow even breath of an old man at the watch. The fire held.
I did not, that night, sleep against the chain. There was no chain.
I slept at the lee of the fire in the wool deel, the lamellar at the foot of the felt, the wolf across my ankles, the bird at the rafter, the old falconer at the windward — and Toghrul a pace to my left, his bandage at the soldier's knot, his back to the door, his face to mine.
I had slept among men for seventeen weeks and never once with my face uncovered to one of them. In the barracks I had slept turned to the wall with the binding-cloth on and one ear awake; in the squad-tent I had slept at the windward of Liu with my back to the squad and my knife at my right hand; even on the cot at the lambing-felt, alone, I had slept with the lamellar laced. I had not known, until this night, that a body could lie down in the dark and let the watching go all the way out of it. It went out of me now by degrees, the way the brace had gone out of my shoulders at the fire — the ear that listened for the wrong breath, the hand that lay near the knife, the thin high wire of attention that had run through every sleep since Yulin — until there was nothing left holding any of it up but the felt under me and the wolf across my ankles and the slow even breath of the man a pace away. I lay in the firelight and watched his face go loose with sleep, the lines the chain and the hunger had cut into it easing, and I thought: this is a thing I will have to learn, the way I learned the bow and the bound chest and the wolf — how to be a person who sleeps with her face uncovered beside the people who know her names. I had no skill in it yet. I had only the ger, and the one night, and the warm air, and the will to learn.
We did not touch the rest of the way. We had touched at the wrists, at the bandage; at the forehead; at the mouth. We did not touch beyond it, on the felt at one pace. The old woman at the supply-wagon had told us the night for the rest of the touching would be the night the man at the chain was no longer the man at the chain, the iron no longer at his ankle, the bandage gone from his thigh, the mother no longer in the Bureau's hands, and the ger in the lee of the ridge no longer a hunter's empty ger but a ger on the white grass under his father's banner.
This was not that night. This was the first night. The first kiss. The first saying. The first lying-down at one pace under no chain. It was enough.
I closed my eyes and held Toghrul at the back of my throat, and on the bond he held Arsulan at the back of his, and the bond carried both at the long even interval of two breaths at the same pace — and the small note of the wind at the smoke-hole, and the old falconer's sleep, and the wolf across my ankles, and the bird at the rafter, and the snow at the door — and, at the lee of the second ridge, the snow holding the bear and the old woman. I held that snow too, in the place at the back of my throat that had held Arsulan nineteen years.
That night there were no other names to hold Arsulan under. There was only Arsulan. And Toghrul. And Belegt-Khan and Khaghan-bürkii and Berke at the windward, and the horses at the windbreak, and the snow at the lee of the second ridge.
I slept, and dreamed of an orchard south of the Yellow River — my mother at the doorstone of the kitchen with a soft piece of apple in her palm, setting it down in the ritual of a mother told her daughter is riding south, not looking up, because she knew.
I held the dream a long while, and woke at the changing of the third with Toghrul's hand at the back of my wrist on the felt — and only there — and steadied, and closed my eyes, and slept until the second hour of the second day, when the blizzard was still at the door.