Chapter Twenty-Five
Two in the Snow
The blizzard broke at the second hour of the second day.
I woke before it broke, in the last dark, to the sound of the wind changing — and that was a thing the steppe had given me in two nights that seventeen weeks of the empire's wars had not, the ability to sleep through a storm and wake at its turning. The blizzard had been a steady roar over the smoke-hole all the night, a sound with no edges, the sound a thing makes when it has settled into doing the only thing it knows. Now the roar had begun to come apart. It thinned at the cap, and dropped, and gathered, and dropped again, the way a fire settles before it goes out. The felt-walls had stopped their long shudder. The cold at the door had a different weight to it. I lay in the wool deel with the wolf across my ankles and read the change the way you read a wound — by what it was doing now compared with what it had done — and I knew, before Berke spoke, that the sky was opening and the day of the ride had come.
It broke at the changing of the second watch on the morning of the nineteenth, when the wind that had turned off the higher plateau after midnight thinned at the smoke-hole of the ger and went still. The fire steadied. Berke, at the windward of it, did not move. He had slept the whole blizzard with his right boot under his blanket and his left beside it and his saddle at his head, breathing the slow even breath of an old falconer; and at the changing of the second watch he opened his eyes and lay still and looked at the place where Khaghan-bürkii sat hooded on the bent willow at the cap.
"My prince," he said into the felt. "The blizzard's broken. The Vermillion will reach the second creek by the changing of the third. The bear and the old woman will be gone from the lee of the second ridge by then."
Toghrul, on the felt a pace from me, said, "Berke."
"We have a half-watch, my prince. And in it, two cuttings to do."
"Two."
"The bear's tooth. The old woman's hair." Berke paused. "And a third thing. The daughter came into her own ger in the boots of a southern empire — the worst boots, the old woman told her, that she'd seen at the foot of an anda in sixty-two years. They're at the foot of the felt, my prince. The daughter is not, after this half-watch, the daughter of the southern boots."
"Berke."
"The third cutting is the boots."
I sat up — in the wool-felt deel and the under-shirt, no lamellar, Belegt at my ankles, the bandage at the corner of the felt and the brown-paper square in my right cuff. The fire burned at the clean note of a fire on a morning a blizzard has broken on. I looked at Berke, and he looked back at me with the long careful eye of a man who had spent eleven days at the willow with the prince's bürkii on his thumb and been told by the bird what I was.
"Daughter," he said. "We don't ride out of an anda's ger in southern boots. There are spare boots at the windbreak — steppe-boots, wolf-skin at the heel, soft at the toe, cut at the ankle the way the steppe grandmothers were taught. Your size. I sized them at the willow on the seventh day, by the bird-eye."
"The bird-eye," I said.
"The bird-eye doesn't lie about the size of a foot."
He sat up, set his saddle where it had lain at his head, rose, and went to the door-flap, and set the felt back on the bent willow and went out into the grey light, and the bird at the rafter shifted under its hood and made no sound.
Toghrul sat up at his good side, the bandage at the soldier's knot inside his thigh, the lamellar still at the foot of the felt. He looked at me across the pace of felt and did not speak.
"Toghrul," I said, in the steppe-tongue.
"Arsulan."
"Berke's at the windbreak. The boots are there. We have a half-watch. Möngke-Dam and the bear are at the lee of the second ridge."
"They are."
I waited a moment. "I dreamed of her."
"Möngke-Dam."
"My mother."
"Tell me."
So I told him — slow, the way you tell a thing you have only just understood. That I had woken with the back of my wrist against the back of his, and said Mama into the wall of the ger in my sleep, and heard back across the bond, in the kitchen-tongue, in the smallest voice, a woman south of the Yellow River in a Bureau wagon on the salt-fork: Arsulan. Come. Come to the bridge. I told him the bridge, the salt-fork, the third night past the eighteenth. I told him the boy at her wrist who had stopped writing, and my father's cough and the brown cloth at his hand, and the lacquered tube at my mother's neck, and the wolf at the windward of the wheel-well — the wolf that had been at the orchard nineteen years. I told him I had never once said the name aloud at the kitchen-floor where the shears had been, and that I had said it in my sleep this morning, and the wind had carried Arsulan back.
He breathed out. "Daughter of Qiaojia. We go to the bridge."
"Toghrul. The bridge is south — the salt-fork, two hundred li below the Wall. The Iron Gates are north of the Wall. Your father is two days east, at the second willow. Your father is your father."
"He is."
I steadied. "Toghrul. You will not ride south with me. You will ride east — to your father's bürkii, to the willow, to the black banner. You will lay your hand over your heart and bow and say to him, in open air, Father, I have come. And he will bow back, and the kurultai will hold, and the war-arrow he has not yet sent south will stay at his thumb at the third notch. Do you hear me?"
He did not answer at once. "Arsulan."
"Toghrul."
"In twenty-four years of my father's service I have ridden east at the bowl of his line at every dawn-drum he has called me, in the steppe-tongue of an anda's son to an anda's father. Every morning of my life I have come up the lee at the angle of the north-east when he called." He steadied himself. "This morning I do not."
"Toghrul—"
"This morning, daughter of Qiaojia, I ride south."
"Your father—"
"My father has a hundred and seventy minghans east at the white grass. He has two of the nine bogdo-shamans at his right side. He has the war-arrow he has not yet sent. He has his own father's bear-tooth sewn inside his lamellar at the breast, from the naadam of his thirteenth year. My father has every tool a Khan of the Black Banner has ever been given." He let it sit. "Your mother has a folded square of brown paper in a tube at her neck, a twelve-year-old at her wrist, and a wolf at the wheel-well of a Bureau wagon." He did not move. "I ride south."
I looked at him across the pace of felt and made myself count the cost of it, because someone in that ger had to and he had decided it would not be him. He was the eldest son of the Khaghan of the Confederation. The whole long war between the empire and the steppe had turned, these eleven months, on his being alive and in the empire's hands — the hostage who closed the chapter or opened it. If he rode east to his father's ordu, the kurultai held, the war-arrow stayed at the thumb, and a hundred thousand men on the white grass and a hundred thousand more south of the Wall went home for the winter and lived. If he rode south with me, to take one peasant woman and one boy off a Bureau wagon, and the Bureau retook him on the salt-road, then everything the breakout had bought — Wei's twenty-eight strokes, the bear's two quarrels, the old woman lying down in the snow at the lee of the second ridge — was spent for nothing, and the war went on, and the war-arrow flew. He knew all of it better than I did. He had been raised inside it. And he was setting it down, the whole weight of it, the way a man sets down a thing he has carried so long he has stopped feeling it as weight, to ride south after a woman he had met four days ago and a mother he had never seen — because, he had decided, his father had every tool and my mother had none. I did not have the steppe-tongue for what that was. I am not sure any tongue has it.
I breathed once. I breathed twice. I held — and then I gave him the thing I had owed him since the felt of the ger and never said.
I said it in open air — not on the bond, not into the prisoner-tent dark at four paces, not into the ger at the first kiss, but aloud, an anda of nineteen to an anda of twenty-four, at the centre of the ger in the grey light of the broken blizzard:
"I love you."
And again: "Toghrul. I love you."
And a third time: "Toghrul Bekei of the Black Banner. I love you."
He held the silence a moment, his eyes on mine, and then he answered — in the same open-air word, the saying I had told him I would set on the morning we rode south, and the morning we rode south was this one:
"Arsulan. I have heard."
He let it carry. "I have heard. And I will hold the saying — the half-watch at the windbreak, the salt-fork, the bridge, every breath of every night of the ride between here and the South Fork. I will hold it until your mother is at the windward of the wagon and the boy at her wrist and you are at the open-air greeting of an anda to her anda's mother. I will hold the saying. Do you hear me?"
"Yes."
"Good." He drew his breath even. "Now. The boots."
I laughed — a clean note in the back of my throat that had made no noise of any kind through the whole of the blizzard — and Belegt lifted his head and looked at me with the long quiet eye of a wolf who had not, in the eighteen days since the bonding, heard his anda make that sound, and then set his head back on his paws and let his breath out slow. Toghrul laughed too, and set his hand at the back of his cropped neck where the orderly's shears had left it, and laughed the laugh of a man with a broken plate at his shoulder and a bandage at his thigh and a wolf at the ankles of the woman a pace away — and then he stopped.
"Arsulan. The boots," he said.
"The boots."
"Burn them."
I burned them.
I took the southern boots from the foot of the felt — stiff at the heel where a steppe-boot is soft, soft at the toe where a steppe-boot is stiff, the leather cut at the ankle by a southern cobbler whose grandmother was never taught the cutting — and I set them at the firepit the dead hunter had dug, the way Möngke-Dam had told me at the supply-wagon I would set them at the door-stone of my own ger one day, in the small ritual of an anda come into her own. This was not my own ger. It was a dead man's. But the old woman lay in the snow at the lee of the second ridge and would not pitch another, and I understood, kneeling at the firepit, that she had given me the ritual at the supply-wagon precisely so that I would have it now, when she could not be here to drum it — that an old shaman teaches a daughter the small rites in advance, against the day she will have to do them alone. I set the boots in the coals. The fire took the leather slowly, the way fire takes a thing that has been walked in and sweated in and soaked and dried a hundred times, and a thick low smoke came off them, and the smoke smelled — as she had laughed it would — not of leather but of the bad sour reek of the southern cobbler's tannery, the smell of every barracks I had stood in and every road I had marched, the empire's whole smell rendering up out of two boots into the morning air. Belegt lifted his nose to it. He sneezed — once, hard, the way the old woman had promised he would, and then he set his head against the inside of my right ankle as if to say the rest of me was the part worth keeping. I knelt at the firepit until the boots were char. Then I stood up barefoot on the felt and let Berke bring the steppe-boots from the windbreak, and I put them on, and they were the first thing I had worn since the morning of the kitchen-floor that had been cut to the shape of me and not to the shape of a soldier I was pretending to be.
We rode out at the changing of the third, into the grey light past the broken blizzard — Berke at the spare string in the lee of the windbreak, Toghrul on the chestnut at my left, Belegt three paces off my boot, the bird working three li off in the north-east.
I was in the steppe-boots: wolf-skin at the heel, soft at the toe, the ankle cut at the curve a steppe cobbler learns from her grandmother, the leather smelling of new tannin and good curing-fat. Belegt lifted his nose to them and did not sneeze. He bowed his head and set the back of his nose at the inside of my right ankle. Daughter. Good boots, he said, on the bond.
Wolf. The bear, I said.
Daughter.
The bear at the lee of the second ridge.
Daughter, the bear knows. The bear lies at the lee of the second ridge with the old woman. The bear does not need our footstep — he holds it now, behind his teeth, in his own chest. He does not need it back.
I breathed. Wolf. I can't ride out without the two cuttings.
They are done, daughter. Berke went to the lee of the second ridge in the snow before the second hour and did the cutting himself — the way an old falconer who has pitched forty yurts in forty hostings has done it for the prince's bird at every one of them — and set them at the chestnut's wineskins. The prince has them.
I looked at Toghrul. He nodded once, and reached to the wineskin at his right, and drew out a small thing the size of a finger-joint: a bear-tooth, cut at the lee of the second ridge in the snow that morning, the soft cradle-blanket-coloured fur still at the root — the fur of the bear the old woman had carried since the prince was three.
He held it across the pace. "Daughter."
I took it. I held it in my palm a moment and looked at it — a thing the length of a finger-joint, yellowed at the root, the cradle-blanket fur still caught at the base where Berke's knife had taken it in the snow that morning. It had been in the bear's jaw since before I was born. The bear had carried Toghrul on his back at three years old; had been the senior bond-beast at a dozen bondings; had sung the khoomei note into the saddles of six Vermillion Guard at the throat of the pass two nights ago and taken two salt-iron quarrels doing it; and now lay at the lee of the second ridge with the old woman against his belly, both of them giving up the long even breath of a thing at the close of its last watch. The tooth was what was left to carry forward. I understood, holding it, what Möngke-Dam had meant at the folding-stool about the count of the bond — that the steppe does not let its dead simply end; it cuts the tooth and the hair and carries them in the tube at the breast, against the new bonding, so that the bowl of one animal pours into the bowl of the next and nothing true is ever wholly lost. I had thought the cutting a grim thing when Berke named it at the ger. It was not grim. It was the steppe's way of refusing to let a death be only a death.
I set it inside the bamboo tube at the under-shirt, in the soft place where my mother's grandmother's tube already held Wei's signed brown-paper square and the folded piece of the orchard-door apple I had not eaten the morning of the shears. It was warm — the warmth of the wineskin, the warmth a bear at his full height gives an anda on the morning he has set her footstep down in his own chest for good. The tube held three things now, from three people who had each chosen a cost for me: the sergeant's slip, the apple my mother had pressed into my hand at a kitchen door, the bear's tooth. I would carry all three to the bridge, and past it, and I would set them down, each at its right doorstone, when the road let me.
I closed my fingers on it, and held it a moment, and let it go.
The morning had cleared to a hard pale blue, the kind of sky the steppe gives after a blizzard has spent itself, and the new snow lay across the white grass clean and unmarked to the edge of sight, and the cold had a bright thin edge to it that went into the lungs like spring water. It was a good day to ride. The old woman had told me it would be.
Berke, at the spare string, said, "My prince. South."
"Berke. South."
We rode — south, into the grey light, the steppe wind at our backs and the snow at the thumbnail, the white grass behind us and, to our right, the long ridge where the bear and the old woman lay in the snow.
I did not look back. Not once.
And then, at the lee of the second ridge, the wind turned at the windward of the bear's right shoulder — at the place the salt-iron had taken him — and carried out to the south-east, and on it, across the bond, from the bowl of the bear into the bowl of me:
Daughter. South.
I drew my breath even. Mother. South, I said, on the bond.
The wind held the saying.
We rode.