Chapter Thirty-Three
The Willow at the Head of the Second Frozen Creek
Berke set the spare string in the lee of the willow at the third hour past noon on the twenty-sixth day.
It was a low brown shrub at the head of the second frozen creek — the same willow where the Khan's second falcon had perched every dawn since the seventeenth, jess on the right foot, hooded head at a small angle, on the steppe-perch its bürkii-master had set in the third bough across three years of training. The wagon-master at the Iron Gates had told Berke, on the eleventh day of the prince's holding, to move that falcon to this willow by the dawn-drum of the seventeenth, and so it had waited here ten mornings.
The willow stood alone at the head of the creek, a low brown thicket of frozen withes the height of a horse, and the creek under it was a white seam in the grass, frozen the whole of its length, and the wind came down the line of it off the higher plateau steady and thin and edged with the small dry tick of snow that was not yet snow. It was the loneliest place I had seen since the Wall — no tents, no fires, no horse-lines, only the willow and the creek and the long brown ridge behind, and on the third bough of the willow the hooded falcon on its steppe-perch, motionless, jess on the right foot, waiting the way it had waited ten mornings. After the empire's wagon-strings and watchtowers it was almost a shock to come up on a thing so empty and so patient, a single bird and a single man holding a single point on the steppe across ten days because a wagon-master at the Iron Gates had told them to.
The bürkii-master himself was at the lee of the willow — a man of fifty-two in the wool-felt deel of the Khan of the Black Banner, sable at the collar, wolf-skin malgai on his head, steppe-bow at his back, saber at his hip, a quiver of grey-fletched arrows at his side. He had been here ten days, in the lee of one brown shrub, alone with a falcon, against the day the prince and the line and the third sheet would come up the creek. He rose when he saw us and bowed.
"My prince," he said.
"Tugrukh."
"My prince. The third sheet?"
Berke held up the broken post-tube at his wrist. "Tugrukh. The third sheet of the orange-peel man's memorial, broken at the seal on the white grass on the twenty-fourth. A salt-iron arrow-tip through the inquisitor's seal — through the corner — through the name. The wolf-girl's name, of the ordu at the bend of the Onon-Selga." He breathed out. "It goes by the second falcon to the third willow, the third falcon to the bürkii, the bürkii to the Khan."
"The line," said Tugrukh, and took the broken tube from Berke's wrist. He tucked it inside his sleeve, over his heart — a man who had served the Khan thirty years and never carried a Cinnabar tube against his own chest — and set the third sheet to the jess of the second falcon, and pressed his own bürkii-master's seal beside the inquisitor's broken one, and laid his hand over his heart, and bowed, and said into the bird: "Brother. The line. The bürkii. The Khan."
The second falcon lifted on the wind and went east — over the second ridge, over the third, gone — to reach the third willow by the dawn-drum of the twenty-eighth, the ordu by the third wind, the felt at the right side of the Khan's pavilion by the dawn-drum of the twenty-ninth.
Tugrukh turned back to Toghrul. "My prince. The kurultai."
Toghrul steadied. "Tugrukh."
"My prince — the Khan has sent two riders these eleven days, the first on the third day of your holding, the second on the seventh. The third he did not send. On the eleventh day your father set the war-arrow at the post of his pavilion, at the third notch."
Toghrul went still at that. I did not yet know, that afternoon at the willow, the whole weight of what a war-arrow at the third notch was — I would learn it at the kurultai, with seven thousand of the Black Banner standing silent at the rings — but I knew it from the way the stillness came down over Toghrul, the way a man goes still when a thing he has carried as a fear has become a fact in the world outside his chest. His father, three thousand li and eleven days from his son, lying in the lung-fever of his third year, had set a birch shaft at a post and cut the third notch in it. It was the difference between a Khan's long patience and a Khan's war. Toghrul looked at the frozen creek a moment, and at the low brown willow, and at the steppe-perch with the falcon hooded on it, and he did not say anything, because there was nothing in the saying that would change the notch.
"And your brother Qara," Tugrukh went on, "rode west from the ordu on the seventh day with a hundred of his minghans. He reached the third willow at the dawn-drum of the twenty-fifth. My prince — when your father reads the third sheet at the twenty-ninth dawn, the inquisitor's writ falls before any word of your brother's can reach a single one of your father's men. But until then, your brother is a hundred minghans who has been told an empire-witch is coming home on your arm." He let it sit. "By the kurultai's reckoning, my prince, your brother is at the count of three."
Toghrul did not answer for a moment. "Tugrukh."
"My prince. Ride."
He looked at me on the chestnut, and drew his breath even. "Arsulan."
"Toghrul."
"Daughter of Möngke-Mara."
"Son of Yesügen."
He set his teeth. "At the kitchen-floor of the ger in the lee of the long grey ridge, I told you I would not ride east. I told you I would ride south. I held to that saying." He paused. "But my brother is at the third willow with a hundred minghans, and he has been the kurultai's man since the seventh year of my name — the one who has counted the days our father has lain in the chest of the lung-fever. He has raised the banner in his own heart already. He is at the count of three."
"Toghrul," I said. "East."
"Arsulan."
"The Khan will have the third sheet by the twenty-ninth. He will have the kurultai, and the brother at the willow with his hundred. But what the Khan has, beneath all of it and the lung-fever both, is one of his sons." I held his eye. "And that son is at this willow, this hour. That son rides east — with the daughter of Möngke-Mara at his side and the second falcon at his back — and at the twenty-ninth dawn he lays his hand over his heart at the felt of his father's pavilion. Not the count of three. The son, come home."
He let his breath go. "Daughter." And then: "The mother."
"The mother and the boy ride at the anda of forty-six's lee," I said, "with the second wolf three paces off her side."
"Yes."
I turned. "Berke. The wolves."
Berke breathed out. "At this willow, daughter. There is a kam in the felt-yurt at the lee."
I steadied, and looked, and there it was: a small felt-yurt the size of a hunter's ger, pitched at the willow's lee seven days now, the door-flap down. A small dark figure stood at the flap — a woman of sixty-one in the deel of a kam of the Black Banner, sable at the collar, and on her head a wolf-skin malgai marked at the inside of the right ear with the bear-tooth of the second bogdo-shaman's line. A drum in her left hand, a willow-stick in her right. River-mud eyes.
I came down off the chestnut and crossed to her, and stopped a pace from the flap.
"Mother," I said, in the steppe-tongue.
"Daughter."
She was so like Möngke-Dam that for a breath the eleven days since the lee of the second ridge folded shut and the old woman was alive again, sitting on a folding-stool with a tin cup she had not let me see her pour. The likeness was in the eyes, the river-mud colour, and in the set of the mouth that looked as if it were about to say a dry thing. It was not Möngke-Dam. It was her sister, and the difference between the two was the difference between a person and the place a person used to stand, and I had to hold both of those at once, the way I was learning to hold everything at once now.
I had not, in eleven days, let myself fully look at the fact of Möngke-Dam in the snow. There had been a bridge to cross and a watchtower to ride and a count of forty-eight to undo, and grief is a thing a soldier learns to set in the kit and carry sealed until there is a watch to open it in, and I had carried her sealed. Standing a pace from her sister's face, the kit came open whether I willed it or not. I had known the old woman fifteen days. Fifteen days, against nineteen years of not knowing my own name — and she had given me the name in the first of them, and the laugh in the third, and the plan that broke me out of the camp, and the deel off her own back, and then she had stayed at the lee of the second ridge with the bear so that the rest of us could go, and the staying was the last thing she gave, the way the bear had stayed before her. Fifteen days, and she had made herself, in them, into one of the names I would carry the rest of my life. I looked at the river-mud eyes of the sister who had lived, and I let the grief for the one who had not stand up in me as far as it would, and I did not weep, because I had learned at the orchard and the muster both how not to, but I let it stand, and Möngke-Tara watched me let it stand, and her river-mud eyes told me she knew exactly which sister I was seeing in her face and did not ask me to stop.
I had not said the next thing aloud in the eleven days since the lee of the second ridge. I said it now. "Mother. The bear at the lee of the second ridge, in the snow, the morning of the eighteenth."
She breathed out. "Daughter. Möngke-Dam, at the lee of the second ridge, in the snow, the morning of the eighteenth."
"Yes."
She was quiet a moment. "Daughter. I am Möngke-Tara of the Black Banner. Third sister of Möngke-Dam of the bogdo-shamans, second sister of Möngke-Mara who sits the bay mare at this willow. I am — by the second falcon that lifted just now — your aunt."
"Aunt," I said, in the kitchen-tongue of Qiaojia.
She laid her hand over her own heart. "Daughter. The drawing."
"Aunt. The wolves," I said.
"The wolves."
I went back to Belegt and set my hand at his windward shoulder, where the two salt-iron quarrels rode in the white fur of the wolf-from-the-bottom-of-the-sloped-white-plain.
He looked at me. Daughter. The drawing, he said, on the bond.
Brother. The drawing, I said.
Daughter. Hold.
He walked with me at the heel, the two quarrels in his shoulder, and Möngke-Tara held the flap, and he went under it, and I went after.
The inside of the felt-yurt was dim and warm and smelled of the things a kam's yurt smells of: dung-smoke and pen-grass and willow-bark and the rendered curing-fat she kept in a horn pot at the fire's lee. A skin of milk-curd hung off the cap-hoop. The drum lay flat at her left knee, a single hide stretched over a willow ring, painted on the inside — I would not see the painting until she lifted it — with the wolf and the bear and the eagle of the bogdo-line. She set Belegt down at the lee of the fire and looked at the two quarrels in his shoulder a long while before she touched anything, the way a woman reads a wound before she works it.
The drum began. I had been inside one of these drawings already — my own bonding, the blue snow, the door — but that had been a making, and this was an unmaking, and the two are not the same work. To make a bond you walk toward a thing. To draw salt-iron out of a bonded body you sit with the thing and refuse to look away while it hurts, and the refusing is the medicine. Möngke-Tara sat with the willow-stick across her knee and the drum at her left hand, and she did not strike it fast, and she did not sing the climbing two-voiced song her sister had sung over my bonding; she sang low, one note under another, a khoomei that put a deep stone-drone at the bottom of her throat and a thin reed of a melody floating somewhere above it, two voices out of one old woman, the way you hum a sick child down — and it was so nearly her sister's voice that I had to hold the felt under my hand to keep from turning to see whether Möngke-Dam had come in out of the snow at the second ridge to sit at the windward of this fire. She had not. She would not. But the drone was the drone Möngke-Dam had drummed over my own bonding, and the bear-tooth at the inside of the right ear of the malgai was the mark of the same line, and I understood that what the old woman had carried in the bowl of her chest larger than a prince's had not died with her in the snow on the eighteenth; it had only changed which throat it sang from. And the salt-iron in Belegt's shoulder began, very slowly, to be a thing that was leaving instead of a thing that was lodged.
I sat at the felt with my hand at his ruff and felt it in my own chest — not the pain, the wolf still took the pain, but the leaving of it, a long backward drag like a splinter working out under the skin over hours instead of seconds, a cold worming withdrawal at the false shoulder I had carried for two days, the iron giving up its place a hair at a time and the place behind it filling not with relief but with a deep tired ache, the ache of a thing that has been wrong for a long time learning how to be right. He breathed against my knee, slow and deliberate, and I breathed with him, and matched him, the two of us at one slow count under the drum, and Möngke-Tara hummed, and the fire burned down and was fed and burned down again, and the dark came up the felt-walls and the smoke-hole at the cap went from grey to nothing.
The drawing held the watch — from the third hour past noon to the second watch of night: two wolves, two anda, the drum and the willow-stick and the bear-tooth malgai and the bond at the breastbone. By the second watch the two quarrels from Belegt's shoulder lay on the felt at the lee of the door. By the third watch the three from the second wolf's body lay beside them. The wolves drew into the centre of the yurt — the first at the lee of the fire, the second at the windward — and Möngke-Tara kept the count, and the drum waited, and the willow-stick was still.
At the dawn-drum of the twenty-seventh, the wolves rose, and walked out under the flap at the easy pace of animals two days past a bond. I felt the going-easy of it in my own chest before I saw it in his body — the false shoulder I had carried for two days went quiet all at once, the cold wire gone, and what was left in its place was clean, only the deep good ache of a thing healing, and I had not known until it stopped how much of me had been braced around it. I had carried his iron three days. I gave it back to the felt and the drum and the willow-stick, and the giving-back was its own kind of bonding, a thing I had not been told about in any song: that an anda and her wolf are not only joined in the wounding but in the mending, and that to sit a night with someone's pain leaving their body through your shared chest is to know them in a place no word reaches. The salt-iron lay undone on the felt behind us, five grey quarrels in a row at the lee of the door, drawn out by the drum and the willow-stick and the third syllable of Möngke-Tara's khoomei. The wolves did not smell of witch-iron any more. They smelled of pen-grass and willow-bark and the curing-fat of the cobbler at the bottom of the sloped white plain.
Möngke-Tara stood at the flap as we went, the drum gone quiet in her hand at last, the willow-stick laid by, and she looked at the two wolves walking out whole and at me coming after them, and she had her sister's river-mud eyes and her sister's mouth that looked about to say a dry thing, and she said one. "Daughter," she said, in the steppe-tongue. "Those were the worst quarrels I have drawn out of a wolf in sixty-one years. Salt-fork iron, late-poured, badly hafted. The southern smiths who forge witch-iron are as poorly taught by their grandmothers as the southern cobblers." And she let the small dry laugh go at the bottom of her throat, her sister's laugh out of a living throat, and I laughed with her, and that was its own mending too.
Belegt came to me and set his nose to my boot. Daughter. Good, he said, on the bond.
Brother. Good, I said.
Möngke-Tara did not ride with us. She would come up the lee to the ordu in her own time, she said, with the drum and the willow-stick and the bone-handle shears of the kam who had held the drum at Boroldai's bonding — the shears, she said, that belonged in the hand of her second sister Möngke-Mara, who had been taken south at fifteen and had carried, all unknowing, a thing of the clan's into the heart of the empire and kept it whole. I did not understand, then, the whole of what she meant by the shears; I would understand it at the ordu, on the night before I rode for the Iron Gates, when my mother held them in two hands at the lee of a door-flap. At the willow I only knew that an old woman with my grandmother's eyes was sending a clan's shears east behind us, and that the sending was a kind of promise.
We rode at the dawn-drum of the twenty-seventh. We rode east — two whole wolves at the heel and the side of us, the iron undone behind on a kam's felt, the second falcon already gone over the ridges with the name, and the cold thin tick of the snow-that-was-not-yet-snow off the higher plateau at our backs.