Eternal Sky 01(18)
Temur grasped those shoulders in both hands. She lifted her breast to his mouth, the long nipple pointed and salty between his lips. He suckled like a babe. She took his hand in hers and pressed it between them, showed him where to touch and how. Her head stretched back, her face a mask of concentration. Her thighs slipped in the sweat of his body when she moved. He felt her body tense in ripples.…
One moon in the sky behind her flared briefly white, brilliant enough to wash the whole of the Veil of Night in blue, then flickered dark as a mirror that reflected nothing. It was the Feather Moon of his cousin Mongke, named after Mongke Khagan, the cousin’s father–and then it was gone.
A hole in the night, that was all.
Temur pulled her down to him and buried his face against her shoulder, crying out something that could have been her name and could have been release and could have been despair.
* * *
She slept in his arms, afterward, and Temur lay awake and watched the night go by. The talk at the campfire lulled and surged and caught and eventually drifted silent, except for one voice that muttered on, low and plaintive, long after everyone else had either dropped off or resorted to feigning sleep. Another night, Temur might have called out a demand to shut up, people were sleeping. But tonight it was part of the music that surrounded him—the shush of wind through the tent lines, the rip of mare’s teeth cropping new grass, the snores of women, the soft talk of young boys on the night watch, the pop of a dying fire. Somewhere in the darkness he heard the cough of a lion, but it was distant, and even the horses barely paused their evening meal to listen.
Sixteen moons drifted across the Veil of Night, towed in a pattern Temur, no shaman-rememberer, did not know how to read for portents. So few of us left. He watched them trail through the night, one outracing another, a third falling behind. His own Iron Moon was set apart from the others now, wandering off to the north of the sky. Temur wondered if Qori Buqa was somewhere with a shaman-rememberer, casting stems to find him, or if his uncle had decided to let him live in defeat and ignominy.
It would be smarter, of course, to have him sought and silenced. But Temur didn’t know what resources Qori Buqa still commanded, or if they would extend to a hunt and assassination.
He turned on his side and curled against Edene’s back, burying his face in her hair.
* * *
In the morning when they awoke, it seemed that the entire camp had picked up in the night and reintegrated itself around them. Cookfires blazed on three sides, and Temur—unearthing himself from Edene’s hair—found Tsareg Altantsetseg cross-legged beside a cooking fire, a shaman-rememberer—third-sexed, like all those who spoke for Mother Night and the Eternal Sky—sitting beside her and rebinding the eight blue knots on his saddle. He smiled as Temur struggled into his trousers and came up. Altantsetseg just sniffed, and without looking at him, said pointedly, “This fire needs more dung if there’s going to be enough tea for everyone.”
“So it does,” Temur said, as Edene rolled over and propped herself on an elbow. “I’ll go fetch that, then.”
Edene threw him his boots as he went past. He threw her a smile.
* * *
From then on, there was no question that Temur was part of the clan. As the hands of days passed, he even heard one or two people from other traveling alliances refer to him as “Tsareg Temur,” and though he was careful to correct them, he began to wonder, with a little hope, if Altantsetseg did indeed intend to adopt him.
Edene came to his blankets every night, until Altantsetseg offered to give them a small tent of their own—with a show of bad grace and a complaint about scaring the horses. Edene refused: Her small sister and cousin needed the tent more.
Altantsetseg humphed, but Temur caught the edge of her toothless grin and realized that she’d been teasing. That eased his heart more than anything. Old women teased and crabbed and picked—but only to their families.
He breathed in and breathed out and felt the war that much farther away and unmissed. When Edene came to him that night, he borrowed her comb and combed out her hair, the sort of office a man might perform for one of his women, if she liked him enough to permit it. And she sat with a small smile and allowed him.
* * *
Temur awoke again after moonset, in the hour of phantoms, when the sky grayed and the mist rose and the cold found its way into every limb. Now, there was silence. Edene had curled in on herself, drawing up the blankets, and Temur lifted his head only reluctantly from the island of warmth they’d created to see Bansh standing over them, alert, ears pricked, her fine-boned head dark against the tarnished sky.