A man—or perhaps something more.
His moustache trailed black as ink across his chin to drape a scale coat of golden horse hooves, and from his shoulders billowed a cloak as blue as the lapis that had glazed the fountain bowls in Qarash’s center square. He had one hand on the mountainside, one foot stepped up as if into a stirrup, and as Temur watched, he rose up and slung his other leg over the high saddle between peaks as if he straddled a mare.
The mountain seemed to agree with him, because he had no sooner settled himself than it snorted, shook itself loose of the earth, and climbed joyfully into the sky. It lifted its cliff-feet with frolicsome pleasure, kicking out once or twice for the sheer joy of it. Temur flinched, expecting a rockfall to follow, but the mountain-mare’s step was light, and on her back the Eternal Sky gentled her with soft touches.
Of the sixty-four sacred colors of horses, she was the color they called storm, a smoked black with a streaked, sparse mane and tail the color of wind-pulled clouds lit from beneath by a rising sun. Her face was swathed broadly with white between the eyes and nostrils, and those eyes were kind and bright. Her ears pricked into a tall oval crown atop her head. She regarded Temur inquisitively from high above.
Perhaps the Eternal Sky saw her looking, because he turned and stared down at Temur.
“A mouse,” he said. “A little steppe fox. Where did you come from, child?”
“I hid,” Temur said. In his dream, it seemed perfectly reasonable to be speaking all the way up to the sky in a calm, low voice. “From the ice.”
“Of course you did,” the Eternal Sky said, and Temur was struck by how much he seemed like the Great Khagan, Temur’s grandfather for whom he was named—or how the Great Khagan was remembered, anyway. Temur had been too young to know him when the old man had died. “Well, just a moment, then. I have a task to be about.”
As Temur watched, the Eternal Sky reached into his coat of hooves and pulled out a long black veil. He wrapped it about his face in triple layers, all save the eyes, where he only drew one pass. Temur could still make out the brilliance of his black eyes behind. He thought the Eternal Sky winked at him.
Somehow, as the Eternal Sky wrapped his face, it seemed he wrapped the sky behind him as well, because with each pass of the cloth, that lapis color grayed and softened, became violet, became indigo. When the Eternal Sky tucked the ends of his scarf in, he became Mother Night.
Mother Night blew Temur a kiss.
“There,” she said, and her voice was the same voice except it was sweet, a woman’s. “That should do for now.”
She began reaching into her pockets and saddlebags, drawing forth ornaments that chimed and clinked. The night was terribly dark now, without stars or moons, but Temur could see her outlined in the same pale silvery light he cast himself. He watched as she lit lamps with a taper and scattered them about the sky, hanging each one on an invisible hook before grasping the fabric of the night and giving it a pull, skating it along the sky. He watched her hang each lamp, but somehow there were thousands more in the sky every time he looked.
Then, the lanterns lit, she began to hang her sequins—a pendant of silver, a pendant of pearl, a pendant of horn, a pendant of costly pale shell all the way from the foreign seashore. A pendant of electrum, a pendant of diamond, a pendant of iron …
“You hung the moons,” Temur said.
She smiled at him through her veil—or so he thought by the shape of the light behind it. “So I did, child. And this one is yours, is it not?”
“Yes,” Temur said.
“Would you like to see it closer?” She extended her hand, her skin dusty gold, like pollen on a mirror-colored horse’s hide.
Temur’s mouth dried with nervousness. Does that happen in a dream?
He reached out his hand to Mother Night’s, and felt her fingers, calloused and leather-damp, wrap his own. A strong pull, and he was behind her on the back of the storm-colored mare. The hot scent of horse surrounded him, and the musk of a woman hard at work.
“Hold on,” Mother Night said, and pulled his hands around her waist as the storm-colored mare slapped her tail in delight and broke into a canter. All the sequins on Night’s veil jingled. “We shall go and see it, then.”
The moon was a tiny bangle hung on the fabric of the night. The moon was a sequin that sparkled by Temur’s nose as he leaned over Night’s shoulder. The moon was a great iron-colored disk swelling before them as the storm-colored mare bore them toward it at impossible speed. Her hooves made no sound in the sky; her mane whipped in scant threads as she tossed her head up to scent the wind. They flew as high as a vulture’s gyre, and sooty wings beat all around them.