Temur had seen Song refugees when he rode with his uncle Mongke south and east to war. The Song were a sedentary people, with their farms and fields of millet and rice, their oxen yoked to turn earth with plow blades rather than haul women’s possessions in their carts. They had suffered greatly without their villages and their homes.
His own people were far more adapted to this life. They knew how to spread out, to make use of the land, to travel safely. Like tortoises, they carried their homes with them wherever they went. Indeed, if it had not been for the war, they would have been making this migration anyway. But now they were months early and moving in greater numbers than was their wont. And because of it, Temur worried for their food, come next winter.
Normally, at the end of the winter season, before moving up to their summer range, the Qersnyk would harrow under the last year’s straw and plant grains and root vegetables in the fields to grow through summer so they could be harvested when the clans returned. This year, there had been no planting, and the ground that now grew green and soft underfoot had been frozen too hard to turn before they were driven from it—which meant famine, come autumn.
But they would worry about that when they were in the mountains alive. For now, the challenge was not dying on the high steppe, bereft of ten-elevenths of their animals and adequate food for the journey.
One sunrise in the second or third hand of days of Temur’s travel with the Tsareg clan, Edene rode up to Temur on that leggy rose-gray filly of hers, the one whose mane was so sparse it did nothing to soften the long stark line of her neck.
“May I ride with you?” she asked, as he finished securing his gear around Bansh’s saddle and tramping the last embers into the wet earth.
This time, she did not cup her hands across her cheeks in embarrassment. She kept her eyes down, demure, and he glanced away to show respect.
He knew he should say no. He should say, I am a man of no clan. He should say, I have no name to give you.
He should do those things, but he was not strong enough to send her away. He said, teasing, “Do you think you can keep up?”
She grinned, teeth flashing white, and had turned her mare and urged her into flight before he had his leg over Bansh’s rump.
The rose-gray filly could run. Temur got a good look at her dappled flanks as she kicked off, her pale belly flashing between dark legs as she alternately dug in and stretched out. Bansh didn’t need his urging to follow. Temur’s off-side foot was barely in the stirrup when she lunged forward, stretching against the reins, her hooves drumming a sharp and aggressive tattoo. He’d never asked her for this before, and it was probably irresponsible to run her now, after forty days of toil and poor diet.
But once he got himself settled and thought about taking up the reins, she had fallen into her stride and shook her head irritably at his interference.
She meant to catch that filly.
Edene rode like a burr stuck in her mane. Like a fat-cheeked manul cat clinging to the back of its prey. Temur heard her shrieking laughter, saw the flicker of the rose-gray’s silver ears as she listened to her rider and to Bansh’s hoofbeats. The liver-bay dug down deep and found the speed to creep up, span by span. Thundering hooves showered clods of muddy grass on the earth behind. Bansh’s head bobbed low, her great shoulders rolling as she surged along in the wake of the taller gray.
They passed sleepy flocks, just beginning to move out with their dogs and tenders for the morning. They passed carts in the process of loading, and a few bands of mares guarded by wary men. So few horses left; so few of the sixty-four sacred colors of horses represented. Temur hoped that most of the bands had scattered on the steppe or been collected by Qori Buqa’s men, rather than being cut down in their blood. He would rather see the horses wild or in his enemy’s hands than dead.
As if responding to his distress, Bansh threw herself forward with ever-greater speed. Temur felt her gather and extend, the rocking motion, the way her body swelled and shrank around each tremendous breath. She moved, and he moved with her, then they were beyond the edge of the refugee train and running, still running, while the grassland rolled away under them as endless as a tax assessor’s scroll.
Slowly, Bansh ate up the rose-gray’s lead. Slowly, she drew up beside her, her breath trailing in smoky plumes through the morning chill, her mottled nose reaching the rose-gray’s flank, her cinch, her shoulder. As he came up on Edene, he saw her turn to check under her arm for his position. He saw her lips moving as she chanted to her mare—swiftness songs, or songs of soundness, he did not know.
He had nothing to say to Bansh. She was flying; she was giving everything to the race, and it would be unfair to ask for more. The world whipped by. Stride by stride, the rose-gray’s lead failed her. Stride by stride, Bansh came on.