Eternal Sky 01(5)

She stood steady as the gray morning when he came up to her, humming low in his throat. I’m here, the noise said. I’m not sneaking. I’m a friend.

When he got close enough, he just stood beside her for a moment, speaking nonsense. He told her she was pretty and asked her name. Her ears flicked, but she didn’t lift her nose from the grass. He didn’t recognize the pattern of triangular nicks cut from their edges—without a shaman-rememberer, there was no way for him to know to whom she might have belonged. She had a good look about her, though—a short straight back, sharp angles, and dense muscles under the hide. She was thin and long-boned after the manner of steppe ponies, not fat with muscle and thick-necked like Song horses.

Gently, Temur slipped the blade beneath a tangle of her harness, edge out, and began to saw the leather. It parted well enough: In a few breaths he had the strap severed. She stood for it, nonchalant, and the next as well. After that, he could slide what remained down her skinny neck one-handed, saving the injured side, and let her shake it off her own ears.

She didn’t like that, snorting and backing away precipitously until her hind hooves thumped on a dead man’s outflung arm and she startled forward again. Temur opened his arms gently and tried to reach her with his voice. “Hush, now, dumpling, little brave one. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine now.”

It was a good thing everything on the steppe smelled like blood, because she didn’t shy from the reek all over him when she picked her way forward. She shoved her nose into his chest, not too hard. Her unchipped hooves, planted stubbornly in the grass, were banded tawny and black. Her eyes were large and clear. Temur felt tears spring up in his own as she pushed him again and whickered.

“I haven’t got any,” he said. “If I had, I would have eaten it.”

She still looked at him expectantly, turning her head aside the better to see him out of one egg-sized eye. He scowled, then when she would not stop staring, he glanced around at the dead. “What am I saying? We can find you all the sweets you want, dumpling, can’t we?”

* * *



Sweets—seeds pounded with honey and mutton fat—reins, a saddlebag’s worth of clothing that wasn’t soaked in blood or piss: All this and more—food, a cooking pot, spare bowstrings, and fresh arrows, though their weights and shaft lengths varied, so he hoped he would not be shooting for prizes before he had a chance to learn the peculiarities of each. He also found a hoof pick and a brush, a bow that wasn’t notched to uselessness, and an iron hatchet. He kept the blankets and fleeces he’d salvaged the night before, rolling them as tightly as he could one-handed. He improvised a sling for the left arm, because the weight of it dragged at his wound and pulled the edges open. Better to go easy and be one-handed for a while than to compound his injury, he thought, though it was harder to apply the wisdom to himself than it would have been to a mount.

He kept calling the mare “Dumpling”—Bansh—and soon it became obvious that she had accepted it as her name. She pricked her ears every time he said it. She had wounds, too, which he found when he brushed the blood and grime from her sides. A long shallow slash across her ribs was the worst of it. The blow could have split her open, and Temur flinched in retroactive sympathy as he cleaned it. Her girth or her master’s leg was all that had saved her.

She let him tend it, though, and begged for more mutton-fat sweets when he was done. She pushed her soft, mottled nose into his pockets and licked his quilted trousers while he worked, and he hadn’t the heart to shove her head away. He sang to her—the clean-healing song and the sound-feet song—and she pricked her ears and huffed sweet breath across his mouth.

They might have been the only two things living for a hundred yart, except the carrion beasts.

When Bansh was clean, Temur picketed her in the least devastated grass he could find and went to butcher another horse. The livers were no good now, after a night and a day and a half, but in the cold the meat hadn’t turned yet, and he took as much of a haunch as he could eat before it went bad. He wrapped it well in oiled hides so the smell wouldn’t bother the mare, then he tied it on behind her saddle.

Mounting one-handed, weak as he was, was no mean feat, and Temur considered himself lucky that Bansh stood for him as sturdily as a practice block. He was glad his grandfather Temusan couldn’t see him as he hauled himself into one iron stirrup, belly down across the saddle. With sharp agony pulling at his neck and shoulder, he struggled upright, stepped through the gap between the pommel and cantle, and found the other stirrup before the mare moved off.