Thirteen moons. No less and no more, every night from rise to set. No matter how many times he allowed himself to count them.
Maybe somewhere, nine hundred yart behind him, the killing was over.
* * *
One day, Temur first noticed that the streams were running south now, to eventually twine into the wild Tsarethi, thence to the ocean he’d heard described, but could not begin to imagine. That night, the killing ice came. The wind roused him from his cold bivouac between stones—the wind and the distress of the mares. He craned his head back in time to see the leading edge of the storm grope black and threatening across the scattered band of moons.
He cursed.
There were stones here, at least, great broken boulders leaned this way and that against each other as if they had tumbled from a great height. One rock slab slanted out from the cliff it had slid from, a narrow passage dark at its base.
There had been no fuel for a fire for days, but he still had some tallow and wicks in his pack. A hurried search found a hollow-surfaced stone that would do. Cold rain spit, freezing to a glaze where it struck, by the time he’d kindled a lamp with flint and steel. He cupped it in his left hand, leading the snorting and uncertain mares into the damp crevice with his right.
Though born under the watchful expanse of the Eternal Sky, the steppe horses were familiar with enclosed spaces. Clans regularly sheltered the most valuable livestock in their white-houses during the worst storms of winter, and the mares could smell the weather coming. So they were discontented and disconcerted, but not terrified. Still, it took time to coax them within, and by the time he had them under shelter, both mares and man were ice-coated and chilled to the bone. The frozen fur at Temur’s collar scratched his throat.
Hastily, Temur set the lamp down and sidled back past the mares, squeezed hard against stone when Bansh shifted unexpectedly. He’d have to back the mares out when the storm ended; there was no way he was turning them in here. He hadn’t retied their gear—just tossed the packs hastily across their withers for moving. Now he heaped the packs behind them, jamming a blanket into crevices to drape over the opening, weighting the bottom with saddlebags and stones. It didn’t keep much wind out, but it was what he had.
The dull thump of icy rain against wool was soon replaced by the rattle of pellets on a frozen surface. Temur stood just within, breathing wearily, listening to it fall, until his makeshift lamp began to flicker and he had to sidle past the horses once more to tend it.
He stripped, bundled himself in a dry long wool shirt and counted on work to warm him while he rubbed the mares dry with scraps of blanket. They were steaming by the time he was done, and that was a good sign; they had not taken a chill.
A draft savaged him every time the wind shifted, and even padded with blankets the ground was stony and harsh, but the fragile warmth of the horses and the lamp soon sent tentative fingers through the confined space. Temur had not intended to doze; the lamp needed constant tending, and he worried for the mares. But the warmth and stillness and the endless hiss of ice entombing them within this crack in the mountainside lulled him, so eventually he bundled himself in fleeces and more blankets and slept.
* * *
In his dream, Temur rose from his body. It lay on the ground, a shriveled, discarded thing. A rag. He wasn’t dead; although the lamp had died he and the mares both seemed to cast a shallow, silvery light. In that, he could see how the pulse beat in the hollow of his throat and how the livid scar stood out on its pallor. Some self-consciousness made him shuffle his dream-feet clear of his crude mortal body. He stood astride himself, as if in stirrups, standing up in the saddle for a wider horizon.
The mares slept standing and did not stir as he walked past them—through them—and through the ice-shielded blanket that closed the door of the impromptu stable. Outside, it was day, by the light, but he could not tell if he stood embanked in a midday mountain fog or if this was the first cold light of morning. Every surface he saw—though he could not see far—was glazed with dull diamond.
The mists blew all around him, so he expected ghosts. But there was nothing—not even suggestive shapes in the fog.
Following an itch he did not fully understand, Temur stepped into the fog. Where his boots should have slipped on the glaze ice, he stood steady, and that too reminded him that he was dreaming. As did the sudden chirp and rise of birdsong—spring and meadow songbirds, not the great Berkut eagles, wolf-killers who haunted the high ranges. Piercing gold rays slanted through the fog, tattering it as swiftly as a sword blade run through silk. Temur raised a hand to shield dazzled eyes, and found himself looking a man in the face.