It was possible that Temur’s path would lead him so far. But beyond that boundary lay the unconquered Rasan Empire, home of a people whose language he did not speak and whose customs he did not know.
Would he follow Edene there? Even assuming she still lived—he was taking a wild chance to suppose the ghosts had taken her to the storied (and purportedly haunted) mountains. But he had to do something.
And it was better than waiting for Qori Buqa’s men to find him and kill him and probably kill the whole Tsareg clan for daring to shelter him, too.
* * *
For a long time, each day’s passage seemed to bring that blue-smoke smudge at the horizon no closer. By the end of the first five-day, though, he could measure against his fingers that the mountains had grown. By then, Temur had outridden the refugee horde, burdened as they were with worldly goods. Another five-day and he could see each day that the Range of Ghosts stood closer, taller. In the third five-day water became more common, and the gazelles and antelope of the high steppe gave way to deer and hares. Temur still saw, occasionally, the broad angle of a vulture’s wings circling overhead, but the bird never drifted close enough that he could tell which type it was.
As he chased the heights, he was leaving spring behind. Here among the gentle foothills, ice still lingered at the stony margins of streams and in the deep shade under evergreens. Temur supplemented his diet of rabbit and marmot with pale buds pinched from the ends of spruce boughs. He tucked these into his cheeks and sucked for their tangy flavor and power to prevent the winter sickness that sometimes made scalps bleed and teeth fall out. It was a good trick for the cold months when the milk of weaning mares dried up and that of the pregnant mares had not yet let down.
Buldshak had her season while they climbed; Bansh did not, and when Temur greased his hand with marmot fat and palpated her, he felt her womb as large and hard as a man’s skull, buried deep in the muscle of her body. She twitched and stamped, but tolerated his indignities.
She was likely in foal, but it would be many months yet before the filly was born. Still, he felt a thrill of excitement; his luck in this mare was amazing. Here she was, the potential foundation of a herd that could be a new start for him—and she’d brought along a foal—if it came to term and all went well.
It struck him as a nakedly encouraging portent. For a few hours, as he rode the bay and led the rose-gray into wooded glades now, he allowed himself to dream that he would rescue Edene and make her his wife and that they would live to an untroubled old age with all their children and her cousins and her cousins’ children.
It was a fantasy, and he knew it. But he was soldier enough to know that such fantasies were all that carried men through the supposed glory of war.
The mountains made their own weather. He knew these hills as well as he knew the steppe: They were the summer range of his folk. So he also knew how dangerous and unpredictable the springtime storms were. His rate of travel slowed, as one of the mares had to carry bundles of fuel—wood for fire here, where there were no casual piles of dry dung at every turning—and each night, he must seek out pasturage for them. The grass here was richer but found in meadows rather than vast sweeps of plain, and the mares needed time to crop and chew. Horses could not bolt their food like dogs or men.
Twice more, the ghosts found him, though not in such armies and vast numbers. Each time, Temur was wakened by the restlessness of the mares in time to cast a circle of salt water around them. Each time, he spent the night uneasily alert, seated comfortably on Bansh’s broad back with the salted arrows on his hip, his strung bow resting comfortably before him. Each time, the ghosts drifted around the borders of his secured circle, wailing soundlessly, displaying the gaping horrors of their bloodless wounds. Each time, they vanished with the mist, so Temur could almost convince himself in the exhausted blur of morning that he’d seen nothing at all.
Forest gave way to high alpine meadow, a lacework of harsh, hardy groundcover around tremendous scattered boulders. The green flanks of the mountains stretched up to stark, knife-blade granite, and Temur at last rejoined the road. There was only one pass through the mountains to Qeshqer. He would have to risk being recognized, if any of his uncle’s men had come this far.
By the equinox, Temur was deep among the Range of Ghosts, their great shadows rendering the Eternal Sky finite. As if in mockery of his fears, the pass was deserted. He imagined caravans waited below for the warm days to come, his people forced early into their summer ranges and hoping there would be no late storm or snow.
Temur pushed on. For this, he’d been hoarding his dried rations, and the salt and sweets and grain for the mares. There was water aplenty at least. It tumbled down the mountainsides in streams so clear and cold his teeth ached just to look upon them. They would run north between the hills, and from there feed the sparse and necessary rivers of the steppe. The cold high air made his head spin, and for three days they climbed. The nights held clear, and the mares were eating from nose bags now, so by the light of thirteen moons they walked late into the night.